UK – Lord Turner, who as chairman of the Pensions Commission has been front-page news in the last few months, was not in the running for personality of the year at the UK pensions awards last night.

The award went to the lower profile Penny Green. She’s president of the Pensions Management Institute and chief executive of the Superannuation Arrangements of the University of London Trustee Co. The shortlist was Green, Pensions Regulator David Norgrove and pensions pundit Ros Altmann.

Turner, who is also vice chairman of Merrill Lynch, has dominated media coverage of pensions lately with the publication of the Commission’s final report earlier this month. His proposals to raise the retirement age and launch a new national pensions scheme have become common currency.

But some 1,300 UK pensions industry professionals were not able to vote for the former CBI chairman at the annual UK pensions awards at the Grosvenor hotel in London.

The Commission has now been wound up and there was no one immediately able to respond on its behalf.

Meanwhile, the Pensions Policy Institute has argued that the proposed NPSS could learn lessons from the New Zealand ‘KiwiSaver’.

It said: “A ‘BritSaver’ learning the lessons from KiwiSaver could be a more appealing and less risky proposal than the NPSS.”

“Auto-enrolment into a low-cost savings scheme is widely supported,” said PPI director Alison O’Connell. “But it is untested on a national scale, so we should tread carefully.”

Elsewhere, has emerged that UK pension funds will have to pay £765,000 (€1.1m) towards actuarial standards and regulation via a new levy.

The Financial Reporting Council said funds will have to pay 45% of the £1.53m costs of the new regime through a levy of £2 per 100 members on pension schemes with more than 1,000 members.

This would be worked out on the basis of information on scheme membership provided to the Pensions Regulator in its scheme returns, the FRC said.