Trustees of certain DC and hybrid pension schemes must regularly review the default strategy and performance of the default arrangement.
TPR has contacted trustees of hundreds of schemes and asked them to confirm that they have reviewed their default arrangements. The move is part of TPR’s ongoing work to protect savers and ensure workplace pensions work.
David Fairs, Executive Director of Regulatory Policy, Analysis and Advice at TPR, said: “Our focus is on good outcomes for savers in their retirements. To provide pension savers with the best pot for retirement they need good investment returns as they contribute into a pension through their employment.
“Regularly reviewing a pension scheme’s default arrangement, which the majority of savers contribute into, is vital for trustees to ensure they are investing in the best interests of members.
“We are working to wake up those trustees who, research has shown us, do not engage with the regulator or sometimes do not realise they are not meeting the standards of governance or administration that we expect.
“This pilot is among some of the things we are doing as part of a new approach to contact trustees about their legal duties, support them to become compliant where we can and inform them about the alternatives – including winding up their scheme – if they do not or cannot meet the standards which we expect.”
Under law, a pension scheme which provides money purchase benefits must review its default strategy and the performance of its default arrangement every three years, or when there is a significant change in a scheme’s investment policy or demographic of its membership. Trustees should check the default arrangement is performing as expected and that the default strategy ensures investments are made in savers’ best interests.
More than 95% of members of trust-based DC schemes are saving in a default arrangement.
More than 500 DC schemes with between two and 999 members have been contacted as part of the pilot. Trustees have been asked to review guidance which outlines our expectations. They are then asked to confirm if the strategy and performance of their scheme’s default arrangement have recently been reviewed and remain suitable, by completing a simple online declaration form. Initial indicators show positive trustee engagement with the pilot.
If a scheme’s default strategy has not been recently reviewed, trustees are being taken through simple steps to comply with the law including reviewing the current strategy, taking members’ needs into account as well as the performance of the default arrangement. Trustees struggling to meet the expected standards should consider whether value for savers would be improved by transferring them into an alternative and better run scheme.
Walking trustees through complying with their requirements is a new approach by TPR for engaging with the most hard-to-reach trustees while also driving up standards of governance.
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