The UK’s safety net for bust pension funds has appointed five non-executive directors, including the chairman of the £17bn Electricity Supply scheme, which has previously been critical of government attempts to help.

The five appointments to the Pension Protection Fund board are: Ian Abrams, an actuary, non-executive director of Mizuho International and a member of the Financial Services and Markets Tribunal; Mark Baker, formerly the Chair of Magnox Electric and since 1996 the chairman of the Electricity Pensions pension fund; Michael Deakin, another actuary and formerly the chief investment officer of HBOS’s fund management arm, Insight Investment; Jeannie Drake, a trade union member; and Christopher Hughes, a lawyer at Wragge and Co.

Legislation setting up the fund was passed earlier this month and is meant to provide extra protection for more than 10 million workers in final salary pension schemes in case their employer goes bust.

And the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) warned in an open letter that changes to the regulatory framework contained in the Finance Act and the Pensions Bill are likely to kill off future forms of defined benefit occupational pensions

Richard Barlow, managing director of Electricity Pensions Services which runs the £17bn (€25.1bn) Electricity Supply pension scheme, told IPE in October that: “Broadly speaking the ESPS would share the views of the NAPF. What has tended to happen with all pensions legislation since the 1980s is that it has not had the effect it was intended to have.

“On this current Bill we started off with proposals to make pensions simpler so that employers would be more likely to offer them. We’ve ended up with provisions for a Pensions Protection Fund that make pensions more complicated and employers less likely to offer them. So you don’t always get what you want, or what you expect or what was intended from government legislation

“Confronted with a huge raft of Government proposals (a) you have to spend a lot of time understanding them (b) you have to spend a lot of time influencing them and (c) you have to spend a lot of time implementing them. And while you are doing all those things you are not actually running your pension scheme at all.”

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