Pensions Regulator Defined Benefit Funding Code of Practice 2024

Debate between Baroness Altmann and Baroness Drake

Monday 21st October 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Drake (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a DB pension scheme trustee as recorded in the register. I thank my noble friend Lord Davies for securing this debate. This is an important code, and it should not pass without comment.

As the Explanatory Memorandum and my noble friend observe, while aggregate DB funding levels have improved in recent years, financial markets and economic conditions are changeable and funding positions can quickly deteriorate. There is a dynamic in the pensions world related to economic circumstances, whether fiscal policies, investment returns, gilt yields or the impact of technologies on markets, to name but a few.

An intended purpose of the code is to allow TPR to be more proactive in identifying and mitigating emerging risks in a targeted way. There have been significant instances over the past 30 years of regulatory failure to identify or respond quickly to emerging risks in DB pension provision, some with dreadful consequences. What do the Government believe are the most compelling levers in this code that will materially improve mitigating such emerging risks?

The new code sets two key requirements: planning for the length of the scheme’s journey plan to get to full funding at an appropriate pace of de-risking and assessing current funding positions when carrying out valuations. As part of that planning, the code trustees must set a funding and investment strategy—that is, the journey to getting to the planned endgame for the scheme. The strategy must set out how the trustees will transition from the scheme’s current funding position to low employer dependency funding when the scheme is mature. In making that transition, how risk can be supported by the employer and the strength of the scheme has to be made clear.

During the consultation a lot of concern was expressed that the new code could weaken an important fiduciary power of trustees to make the investment allocation decisions by requiring trustees to invest in line with the investments set out in the funding and investment strategy that must be agreed with the sponsoring employers. In response to those concerns, although changes have been made to the code to clarify that decisions in relation to the scheme’s investment allocation are not constrained by the notional investment allocations in the funding and investment strategy, an inference remains that, in most instances, TPR expects trustees to align their investment strategy with the funding and investment strategy. Will the Minister confirm unequivocally that the code will not remove the power of existing trustees to decide on the scheme’s investment allocation? It is an important power in addressing moral hazard.

The code places a welcome greater emphasis on the strength of the sponsoring employer covenant, which is of fundamental importance but is often lost in debate, when considering funding and investment risk. The level of cash generated by a sponsoring employer and its future prospects will be key determinants of how much investment risk a scheme should take. The strength of an employer covenant can change very quickly following mergers, acquisitions, restructurings et cetera. Such changes may result in changes to the level of debt in a company, dividend policy, free cash flow, covenant and longevity. The code requires any funding deficits to be repaid as quickly as the sponsor can reasonably afford, but trustees will have to consider the impact on the employer’s sustainable growth. Trustees will need to assess such affordability annually; they will also have to provide evidence for their view of what is reasonably affordable and their opinion on the maximum supportable risk that a sponsor employer can bear.

These are potentially significant areas for disagreement between sponsoring employers and trustees, with one seeking to discharge a fiduciary duty to protect its members and another wanting maximum freedom from the liability of funding a pension scheme, but TPR has still to provide its covenant guidance on the main areas that trustees must consider when assessing the employer covenant. In that sense, there is a significant area of this code where an important point of detail is missing. Can the Minister advise when such covenant guidance will be issued?

The code emphasises a flexible and scheme-specific approach to regulation, taking into account the variety of DB schemes. It contains provisions for schemes that remain open to new members and may not be maturing, such as schemes that are now closed. Again, that is quite a controversial issue in the initial iteration and consultation on the development of this code. The considerations around investment strategy and the ability of trustees to choose how to invest now recognise the different characteristics of open schemes compared to closed schemes; the importance to open schemes of long-term planning; and a more flexible approach to assessing investment risk, which is supportable by the covenant and the scheme.

Finally, the Explanatory Memorandum—I shall pick up with brevity a point that my noble friend elaborated on in more detail—states:

“The approach to monitoring this legislation is that there is no requirement to carry out a statutory review of the draft Code”.


However, as we all know, the previous Government were—and, more so, the current Government are—focused on the issue of wider funded pension scheme consolidation and scheme investment strategies. Although I recognise that the Minister cannot comment on the outcome of such considerations or what may flow from the first pension review, if those outcomes had an impact on the provisions of the DB code, what would be the mechanism and consultation for revising the code as a consequence?

[Baroness Altmann (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Davies, on securing this important debate. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Drake: the code is an important document that certainly deserves the attention of this Committee. I apologise to the Minister because this debate may well end up lasting more than the half an hour that was apparently expected; I will try to be as succinct as I can.

The overall aim of the defined benefit code is to protect member benefits. The whole point of the code was that, in the past, there had been a kind of free-for-all where employers and trustees could invest and take as much investment risk as they wished. Given other circumstances in the market, hundreds of thousands of members either lost their benefits or were at significant risk of doing so. I welcome the fact that there is now a stronger regulator, the Pension Protection Fund and this kind of code, which is constantly being revised and updated.

However, I stress that I agree wholeheartedly with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Davies, that this particular document, like previous documents, is rather too prescriptive, with excessive requirements placed on trustees, who may or may not need them. It seems to attribute spurious accuracy to an inherently uncertain outcome of events. The kind of box-ticking and groupthink approach that needs to be revised within 15 months of each new valuation will be costly to the schemes, and it is not clear what value will be added if the long-term strategy is unchanged or not likely to change.

Some of the issues we are grappling with, in this code and in the defined benefit universe as a whole, are dependent on and the result of the exceptional period of quantitative easing introduced in 2009. It was deliberately designed to drive down government bond yields and, concomitantly, to clearly put a much greater inflation risk on liabilities. That is indeed what happened. Initially, assets did not keep up with liabilities, but the fears of ongoing falls in gilt yields over that subsequent period, as quantitative easing, gilt printing and the driving down of long-term bond yields continued, have made anyone involved in the defined benefit space rather nervous of what are called “non-matching assets”.

We had a reversal of conventional thinking about defined benefit pension schemes. They were supposed to invest to take risk and welcome risk placed judiciously. This thinking became: do not take risk or try to beat the gilt market, because the gilt market may beat you and increase your deficit. So a whole groupthink built up around the idea that defined benefit pension schemes should have as much as possible in so-called matching assets, because you want to match your liabilities. The fact is that, if you want good funding, you need to outperform your liabilities—just matching them is not sufficient—but I am not sure that that is reflected very much in the code for schemes that are not in healthy surplus.

I welcome the Minister’s comments on the fact that we are talking about estimated liabilities based on expected future values, relative to current mark-to-market actual values for the assets, and on whether the risks of attributing that spurious accuracy to the long-term liabilities have been sufficiently considered. In this regard I declare my interests: I work with some defined benefit pension schemes, and have done so in the past, to advise on investment strategy.

It seems to me that part of the thinking going through this defined benefit code is that it is better for all schemes to fail conventionally than for too many schemes to try to do unconventional things that might succeed but incur greater risk. I feel we need more scheme-specific flexibility there, and we need to consider the impact of quantitative tightening and how that will be different for the pension liabilities associated with these schemes.

I welcome the differentiation mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, and the noble Lord, Lord Davies, between open and closed schemes. I urge the Government to consider going further in allowing and enabling open schemes to take advantage of investment opportunities from a diversified array of risk assets, even in circumstances where there is, perhaps, some nervousness about the sustainability of the employer.

There is concern about the stability of the gilt market, but there is also an inherent conflict between that desire for stability and the need for outperformance of liabilities that these schemes could be delivering. If capitalism is not at an end—one might argue that it is—then investing in assets of higher risk than government bonds or the supposedly safer assets should, on aggregate and in the long run, deliver better returns. On top of that, we have a Government who rightly want to use more pension assets to boost the economy. There are assets such as infrastructure, small growth companies and equities as a whole, both domestically and internationally, that could deliver that objective, but they entail risk. That is where I hope the funding code may be further refined.