Julian Mund, chief executive officer of the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA), said the association would launch a new research project that would look at the state of the UK pension schemes’ best practices as well as future challenges.
The announcement was made yesterday during its virtual Local Authority Conference, the largest of its kind dedicated to the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS).
The research is going to look at the biggest issues facing the LGPS including getting the guidance funds will need, attracting the talent they want, and reducing the burden of its burgeoning administration from complex regulation, Mund said.
The research will have four main objectives:
- to develop a comprehensive understanding of the major issues and challenges facing the operation of the scheme;
- to establish a base of understanding to measure against in future years;
- to identify best practices or gaps in effective operations; and
- to identify where additional clarity is needed from guidance from the regulators and the government, and how the scheme may evolve in the future.
The research will be conducted through a series of roundtables, a survey and case studies, as well as through the production of one of the PLSA’s biggest pieces of thought-leading policy work for 2021, it claimed.
“If you were working in local authority pensions in 2005, would you have known what the landscape of the LGPS would be today?” Mund asked.
“Of course, the same ever-present issues would have been influencing the direction of travel – resources, administration, governance, regulation,” he said, adding that these issues were “well before the wave of change that began in 2014 with the switch to a career average scheme and the origins of pooling”.
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