Insight
Pensions: what's new this week - September 9, 2024
Call for evidence: pensions investment review
The government has launched a Call for Evidence as part of its pensions review, seeking evidence on a range of questions to guide its considerations and stakeholder workshops. The questions relate to DC and Local Government Pension Scheme funds, but not to the wider DB sector. Topics raised include:
- Consolidation of the DC market – advantages and risks, barriers to consolidation, and the role of employer-sponsored occupational schemes in a more consolidated DC market.
- Costs vs value: the impact of costs on asset allocation, and the potential for interventions to encourage investment strategies seeking higher returns.
- Investing in the UK: the potential to increase net investment in UK asset classes such as unlisted and listed equity and infrastructure, and the potential for interventions to raise portfolio allocations to particular UK asset classes.
The deadline for responses is September 25 2024.
Read the Government's Call for Evidence
TPR: dashboards compliance and enforcement policy
The Pensions Regulator has published its pensions dashboards compliance and enforcement policy and, in a blog post published alongside the policy, has again urged trustees and scheme managers to make sure they are prepared in good time to comply with their dashboards duties. TPR intends to carry out engagement with schemes this autumn, asking how data is being measured and improved in preparation for the introduction of dashboards.
TPR emphasises that it expects trustees to be able to demonstrate that they have had regard to connection guidance and are preparing to connect in a staged and orderly way, with robust controls and contractual agreements with service providers. The blog post includes a link to a preparation checklist to support trustees.
The compliance and enforcement policy recognises that delivering pensions dashboards is a challenge for the industry, and TPR plans to take a pragmatic approach save in cases of wilful or reckless non-compliance. TPR’s focus will be on the quality of scheme data and on robust internal scheme governance, together with connection compliance. It acknowledges that schemes will be highly dependent on third parties and will use its powers against
those third parties where necessary.
TPR underlines that it expects schemes to keep audit trails of their preparations for dashboards compliance, including their data matching policy and steps taken to improve their data. It also discusses how it will monitor compliance, and notes that existing duties to report breaches of the law will apply to dashboards compliance. The policy sets out some of the factors TPR will consider in deciding whether regulatory action is required in response to a breach, together with illustrative scenarios of how TPR might deal with example breach situations.
Read the compliance and enforcement policy
Read the Pensions Regulator's blog post here
Reminder: Pensions Academy Online, September, 17 and 19, 2024
Our next Pensions Academy Online webinars will take place on September Tuesday 17 and Thursday 19 2024.
Each webinar begins at 9.30am and will last approximately one hour. Join us for:
- Legal update – September, Tuesday 17: we’ll round up all the latest developments and outline what’s coming in the new Pension Schemes Bill and wider pensions review, as well as highlighting some significant decisions from the Pensions Ombudsman and the Court of Appeal.
- Dilemmas for DB Trustees – September, Thursday 19: in this session we will look at the challenges and choices on the agendas of DB trustee boards: asset allocation and changes to surplus rules; run-on or endgame; buy-in, buy-out or consolidate?
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