Jane Marshall

The archives of the Pensions Archive Trust contain unexpected insights into our pensions past. Take for example our collections relating to nurses’ pensions. In 1887, with active encouragement from Florence Nightingale, Henry Burdett, who was the secretary to the...

In November 2021, the Pensions Management Institute celebrated its 45th anniversary. All anniversaries prompt reflection on the past and thoughts about the future, but to pensions professionals, industry anniversaries hold particular fascination. Not only can we see how much the pensions landscape has changed, but we can also see how the same themes and solutions persist in changing times.

The Association of Consulting Actuaries was formed over 70 years ago. Its evolution was documented in a short history of the Association, written by Ron Abbott and published in October 1991 to mark its 40th anniversary. The document appears in PAT’s archive collections.

September’s Pensions Awareness Week is the 10th anniversary of a campaign to encourage everyone to get to grips with retirement savings. Although not a new idea, pensions education has never been needed more. Most underestimate the savings needed to enjoy a comfortable retirement and may have wholly unrealistic expectations about what can be provided by the State and minimal auto enrolment savings.

The first day of the battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest of the First World War, was on 1 July 1916. The pension treatment of servicemen and dependants in that and other conflicts is an interesting topic, and the Pensions Archive Trust with other national collections contains much relevant material, ranging from lists of employees on war service and correspondence regarding their pension contributions to much earlier attempts to support those who needed help.

In June 2005, the Pensions Regulator’s second Code of Practice came into force. Dealing with Notifiable events, it followed hard on the heels of the first Code, issued three months earlier.

On 17th May 1990, the European Court of Justice handed down its judgement in the celebrated case of Barber v Guardian Royal Exchange. Mr Barber had been dismissed at age 52 and awarded a deferred pension at Normal Retirement Date, age 62. He complained that in the same circumstances a woman would have been entitled to an immediate pension.

On 6 April 2006, a new pensions tax regime came into force introduced by the then Labour government. ‘A -day’ created a single framework to replace the eight different regimes which had previously applied.  Key features were the new Lifetime and Annual Allowances, set at £1.5 million and £225,000 respectively.

In March 2020 the Pensions Regulator published guidance to pension trustees about the conflict in Ukraine. Noting that schemes were adopting a range of responses, from writing down the value of Russian assets to disinvesting entirely where practical, it reminded them that they needed to prioritise their fiduciary duties “although you can also take account of other factors, such as member views on ethical and social governance. Your decisions should also reflect your scheme’s investment policy as set out in the statement of investment principles.”

By February 2018, all employers had to comply with the auto-enrolment requirements of the Pensions Act 2008. The objective was to increase the number of employees who were accumulating workplace pensions – particularly important in the private sector, where the closure of final salary schemes to new entrants and to future accrual was accelerating. Under the new rules, an employee qualifying for auto-enrolment had to make a conscious choice to opt out and forgo prescribed minimum contributions.