We’re your trustees – the people who look after your pension. This is a short version of our Chair’s statement, which tells you about the work we did during the scheme year 1 April 2021 – 31 March 2022.
You can read the full version of the Chair’s statement here.
Who are we?
- Joanne Segars (chair)
- Ed Jones
- Adrian Kennett (on behalf of Dalriada Trustees, an independent trustee company)
- Gary Smith
- Tracy Weller
We’re pension and investment professionals with lots of industry experience, who work together to look after the Scheme. We meet six times a year and have smaller sub-committees to deal with specialist areas like investment and communication.
We take training to improve our knowledge. And we spend time making sure we’re familiar with the Scheme’s documents and policies.
We’re independent and not connected to any of the organisations that provide services to the Scheme. We confirm this at the start of every trustee meeting.
Every three years we get an independent review of how effective we are. The most recent, in 2022, found we were a high-performing trustee board and made a few suggestions to ensure we can be even better. So you can be sure we’re well qualified to look after your pension money.
What did we do during the year?
- Strengthened the way we measure if the Scheme gives you good value. All areas were scored as ‘good’ or ‘very good’.
- Oversaw improvements to the service you get, including calls being answered faster.
- Improved how we check what happens to your money and personal details.
- Changed the investments to be greener and target more growth.
- Improved the ways we communicate with you, including the website and benefit statement.
What do we want to do in future?
• We’ll carry on asking you for feedback and suggestions and acting on them.
• We’ll continue to press for improvements to the service you get from the Scheme.
• We’ll start another review of the investments so they stay suitable and continue to meet your needs.
• We’ll carry on lobbying government and campaigning for change to help the most vulnerable and excluded people save for retirement.
Scheme year facts
The number of savers in the Scheme went up from 1.7 million to 1.9 million. This included around 70,000 Uber drivers joining a workplace pension for the first time.
The amount of money in the Scheme increased from £2.3 billion to £3.45 billion partly because of more people paying in, but also because the investments did well.
Good value for you
Every year we look at our costs and charge to make sure they’re good value. We think they are. Even though we put our admin charge up from £1.50 to £1.75 a month from 6 April 2022, our charges are still lower than the government’s charge cap for our kind of pension scheme.
We’d been campaigning for the government to ban charges on pension savings worth £100 or less, and this was introduced from 6 April 2022. So now we don’t take the admin charge if:
- your pension savings are worth £100 or less, or
- taking the admin charge would put your savings below £100.
We also look at the total value you get from the Scheme over a lifetime of saving. We’ve made the way we measure this stronger by scoring four areas:
- governance (how we look after the Scheme)
- member services
- investment governance (how we look after the investments), and
- investment performance.
The Scheme scored as ‘good ‘or ‘very good’ in all four areas.
Service improvements
During the year these included:
- how fast calls to the contact centre are answered
- how quickly contributions are invested, and
- how soon money is paid to the people who qualify when someone dies.
There was a particularly big improvement in the rating for answering general enquiries, which went from red to green during the year.
New processes have been introduced. There’s now a dedicated team for processing contributions, bank accounts are monitored daily and two people check all the investment and banking transactions.
The Scheme holds a lot of important information about you and we ask for regular checks to make sure these details are safe and correct. We’ve raised the standards for measuring the quality of the details the Scheme holds and were pleased to see there was an improvement in quality during the year.
Changing investments
We believe a single investment strategy is the best approach for our savers. In other large pension schemes like ours, around 90% of people are in the default investment option (the one you go into if you don’t choose anything else). And only around 7% of people regularly review how their investments are doing.
So we’ve designed our investment strategy to make your pension savings work as hard as possible in different economic conditions, by balancing different types of risk.
During the year we changed the investment strategy to:
- go for more growth during most of your working life, and
- use more green and sustainable investments.
We were already investing in green bonds financing renewable energy, green buildings and green transport projects. We increased the green and low carbon investments – for example, investing in lower-carbon companies. We also stopped investing directly in fossil fuels and added an environmental fund.
We had a target of 50% sustainable investments by the end of 2021. By June 2021 we’d already met that target.
Communicating with you
During the year we reviewed the way we communicate with you and made a number of improvements.
- An online form for asking questions through the website has been successful, with 18,000 contacts since it went live.
- Information about retiring or transferring out now includes timescales to give you a better idea of how long things will take.
- Login and navigation through the website is simpler – in particular, it’s easier to find info on pension scams.
- Improvements to benefit statements included adding a scam warning. There was a small increase in the number of people downloading their benefit statements and watching the video that explains what the benefit statement says.
Please carry on giving us feedback – we learn a lot from it. You can contact us directly by emailing trustees@nowpensions.com. If you’ve got a question about the Scheme, you can email membersupport@nowpensions.com.
