NAPF welcomes OFT update on pensions investigation

The National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) welcomed today’s (Thurs) progress update from the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) on its defined contribution workplace pension market study.

Joanne Segars, Chief Executive, NAPF, said:

“People must be able to trust their pension. Suspicion about fees and charges could undermine much-needed reforms to automatically bring all workers into a pension. It is pointless to put people into a pension that eats their savings away through high or opaque charges.

“The industry needs to be as transparent as possible so that people understand what they are being charged and why. The situation has got better, but we could do a lot more to improve the way we communicate with savers.

“The OFT has made the right diagnosis with its concerns about governance and scale. A big part of the problem is that there are too many small pension schemes. While some small schemes are well-run, too many struggle to deliver good value for money. Bigger schemes are more likely to offer strong governance and keep costs down through economies of scale.

“We need to see a radical reshaping of the pension market to create a smaller number of much larger pension schemes.”

 

Notes to editors:

The NAPF is the leading voice of workplace pensions in the UK. We speak for 1,300 pension schemes with some 16 million members and assets of around £900 billion. NAPF members also include over 400 businesses providing essential services to the pensions sector.

 

Contacts:

Paul Platt, Head of Media and PR, NAPF, 020 7601 1717 or 07917 506 683, [email protected]

Aimee Savage Richards, Press Officer (interim), 020 7601 1718 or 07825 171 446, [email protected]