Chief Executive Lesley Titcomb said: “Unprecedented changes to the way people save for retirement and access their pension has placed an even greater emphasis on the need to ensure people have access to the workplace pension to which they are entitled. Our Corporate Plan has been designed to meet this challenge.
“Automatic enrolment has brought workplace pensions into focus for millions more people, and so our regulatory reach now goes beyond trustees to employers who have duties to enrol their staff into a pension scheme. We expect those schemes to be well run and to deliver good outcomes”.
“Against a backdrop of intense public scrutiny of pensions and retirement saving, we are taking bolder steps to address emerging risks, such as cyber crime and the developing defined contribution (DC) market, and we will be more innovative in the support we provide to trustees, sponsoring employers and members.”
To address possible issues with the quality and viability of some master trusts, TPR will continue to guide employers preparing to meet their pension duties to multi employer schemes, such as group personal pensions run by FCA-authorised providers and master trusts that have obtained master trust assurance. TPR will work with ICAEW to develop a revised version of the assurance framework.
It will work with the FCA and government to identify and address unmitigated risks to members of master trusts and will engage directly with any master trusts that are causing concern.
Elsewhere, the Corporate Plan sets out how TPR will maintain its educate, enable and enforce approach to the successful implementation of automatic enrolment among hundreds of thousands of small and micro employers. This will include further simplification of its processes and building its compliance and enforcement capability.
The plan highlights the need to improve savers’ understanding of pensions and, if necessary, TPR will facilitate the creation of a pensions dashboard and/or related products in partnership with the FCA and government departments.
TPR has committed to achieving a 17% reduction to its levy 2015-2016 funding baseline by 2019-2020. On its automatic enrolment activities, it has identified a significant reduction against previous planned spend between 2016-2017 and 2020-2021.
Lesley Titcomb said: “Despite the challenge of meeting reductions in spending, automatic enrolment compliance levels amongst smaller businesses have been at the top end of our expectations so far, and we are confident that we have the resources necessary to perform our role.”
View the Corporate Plan here
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