Get SAFE | Support After Financial Exploitation
Why Britain needs an Employer Pension Stewardship Duty alongside Lifetime Pension Evidence Protection.
A pension is part of your pay. So where does your employer’s responsibility end?
When you take a job, your employer may promise more than a salary.
There may be a pension.
It forms part of the remuneration package that attracts you to the job and rewards you for your work. You accept less money in your pocket today in exchange for financial security tomorrow.
Your employer selects or sponsors the pension arrangement. Contributions are paid. Trustees or pension providers are entrusted with administering your retirement benefits.
You spend years, sometimes decades, building up those entitlements.
Then something goes wrong.
Your pension is transferred into an arrangement subsequently found to be fraudulent. Your retirement savings disappear.
You ask the original pension scheme to explain what happened.
The trustees cannot produce the transfer records. The administrator has changed. The historic paperwork cannot be located.
You turn to the employer whose pension arrangement you joined.
And discover that its legal responsibilities may be much more limited than you imagined.
How can an employer promise a pension as part of your pay, yet potentially have no responsibility for the failure of the institutions entrusted with protecting it?
That is the question we believe Parliament needs to examine.
Deferred pay deserves continuing protection
Pensions are widely understood as deferred remuneration.
Instead of receiving the entire value of your employment package as immediate salary, part is directed towards providing retirement benefits.
The arrangements differ between defined-benefit and defined-contribution pensions. A defined-benefit scheme promises benefits calculated under its rules. A defined-contribution arrangement generally provides a fund whose eventual value depends on contributions and investment performance.
But both involve remuneration earned through employment.
And in workplace pensions, employees often have little practical influence over the employer’s choice of scheme.
They do not normally appoint the initial trustees.
They do not negotiate the administration contracts.
They do not decide how historical records will be preserved when administrators change.
They trust the arrangements their employer has established or selected.
If the employee has little control over the institutions, why should the employee bear the full consequences when those institutions fail?
That does not mean employers should guarantee every investment outcome.
It means we should examine whether their responsibility for pension governance is proportionate to the influence they exercise over the arrangements.
What does the law currently require?
UK employers already have important pension obligations.
Under automatic enrolment legislation, employers must provide qualifying pension arrangements for eligible workers, make the required contributions, communicate prescribed information and maintain relevant compliance records.
These are continuing responsibilities, not simply duties performed on the day the scheme is selected.
But occupational pension trustees have separate legal obligations.
Trustees are responsible for administering their schemes in accordance with the law and scheme rules, protecting members’ interests and maintaining appropriate records.
The Pensions Regulator makes clear that trustees remain responsible for proper scheme administration even when the work is outsourced.
That separation is important.
Trustees must exercise independent judgement. Employers should not be permitted to interfere improperly with decisions that belong to trustees.
However, this division of responsibilities creates a further question.
What duties should remain with the employer when the pension arrangements it established or sponsored suffer serious governance failures?
Current law does not impose a universal employer guarantee against every fraudulent transfer, trustee error or missing document.
Whether an employer has legal liability depends on the scheme structure, contractual obligations, statutory duties, powers, knowledge and conduct.
But the absence of automatic liability should not end the discussion about accountability.
When the pension money disappears
Consider a hypothetical employee who accumulated substantial pension rights over thirty years.
The employee requests a transfer to an overseas pension arrangement.
The original scheme processes the transfer.
Years later, the receiving arrangement is discovered to have been involved in fraud or serious misconduct. The pension savings are lost.
The employee asks whether the original trustees complied with the transfer requirements applicable at the time.
Were valuable guarantees identified?
Was the transfer value correctly calculated?
Were the appropriate warnings given?
Were the necessary statutory safeguards satisfied?
Was the transfer lawfully authorised?
The trustees cannot immediately produce the records.
The former administrator no longer holds the documents. The replacement administrator says it never received the archived files.
The employee is left trying to reconstruct decisions made by institutions over which they had no control.
Missing records do not, by themselves, prove an unlawful transfer. Nor does a subsequent fraud automatically mean the original trustees acted improperly.
But without the evidence, how can the employee establish whether the institutions fulfilled their obligations?
And what responsibility, if any, should remain with the employer that established or sponsored the original pension scheme?
The missing link: employer stewardship
We believe this exposes another potential weakness in pension governance.
We call it the Employer Pension Stewardship Gap.
The employer receives the commercial benefits of offering pension provision as part of its remuneration package.
The trustees administer the scheme.
The pension provider or administrator performs the operational work.
But if something goes wrong, responsibility can become fragmented across institutions.
One organisation may say it was not responsible for the transfer.
Another may say it no longer holds the records.
A third may say its contractual responsibilities have ended.
Meanwhile, the member is left without answers.
There is a distinction worth making.
Delegating pension administration should not automatically mean extinguishing every responsibility for the arrangements through which deferred remuneration is delivered.
The extent of that responsibility must depend on the employer’s actual powers, duties and involvement.
But where an employer retains powers to appoint trustees, receives credible warnings of governance failures or possesses documents essential to establishing members’ rights, those circumstances should matter.
An employer should not be permitted to ignore serious failures merely because another institution performs the day-to-day administration, where the employer itself has a relevant legal duty and the ability to act.
Employers may hold the missing evidence
There is another reason employers should be part of the conversation.
Even where they have no legal liability for a pension loss, employers may possess valuable historical evidence.
They may hold scheme booklets, trust deeds, trustee appointment records, administration agreements, pension communications and correspondence relating to scheme changes.
These documents may help establish which institutions were responsible for particular pension rights at a particular time.
They may also identify where records were transferred when administrators changed.
Imagine an employee seeking evidence of a pension transfer completed fifteen years ago.
The current administrator has no file.
The former administrator cannot locate the documents.
But the sponsoring employer may still hold records identifying the trustees, the administration contract or the original scheme rules.
Why should that information remain inaccessible when it could help resolve a legitimate dispute?
We believe employers should have a clearly defined duty to cooperate with reasonable investigations into pension rights arising from their employment arrangements.
This would not automatically make them responsible for compensating the member.
It would help ensure that the evidence necessary to investigate the member’s rights can be found.
Cooperation with an investigation and liability for the underlying loss are different questions.
Both deserve proper consideration.
The pension evidence gap
This issue connects directly with our campaign for Lifetime Pension Evidence Protection.
People may accumulate pension rights over forty years.
Those rights can remain relevant throughout retirement and, in some circumstances, beyond the member’s death.
Yet some statutory pension record-retention requirements specify minimum periods of six years.
These are not universal limits. Other obligations may require records to be preserved for much longer.
Indeed, The Pensions Regulator recognises that pension records should be retained for as long as they remain relevant.
But the essential question remains.
What happens when a scheme changes administrators, transfers liabilities or winds up?
Who guarantees that the records necessary to establish accrued rights, guarantees, transfers, benefit calculations and the lawful discharge of obligations remain accessible?
Pension records should last as long as pension rights.
That principle should apply regardless of how many times the institutions responsible for administering those rights change.
We should not allow an institutional reorganisation to become an evidential dead end for members.
Should employers be on the hook?
There is an important distinction between three situations.
First, an employer may have established a properly governed pension scheme, fulfilled its own duties and had no relevant involvement in a subsequent fraudulent transfer. Automatic liability would be difficult to justify.
Second, an employer may have retained powers over trustee appointments or governance, received warnings of serious failures and failed to take action required of it. That raises questions about the employer’s own conduct and whether it breached any applicable duties.
Third, an employer may possess essential evidence but decline to assist a reasonable investigation into historic pension rights.
The third situation may not establish compensation liability, but it raises a serious question about cooperation and accountability.
We believe the law should distinguish between these circumstances rather than treating employers as either entirely responsible or entirely removed from the problem.
The objective should be to make institutions accountable for the responsibilities they actually possess.
Where a breach causes an established financial loss, effective redress should be available.
Where the responsible institution no longer exists or cannot meet its liabilities, Parliament should consider an appropriate compensation backstop.
The member should not become the default bearer of losses caused by institutional failures simply because responsibility has become difficult to trace.
Our proposal: an Employer Pension Stewardship Duty
Get SAFE believes Parliament should consider introducing an explicit Employer Pension Stewardship Duty.
It would complement, rather than replace, the independent responsibilities of trustees and pension providers.
We propose five principles.
1. Responsible selection
Employers should exercise reasonable care when selecting workplace pension arrangements, taking account of the suitability and governance of the scheme.
2. Proportionate continuing oversight
Employers should respond appropriately to credible evidence of serious governance failures where they retain relevant powers or responsibilities.
This should not permit interference with independent trustee decisions.
3. Preservation of pension evidence
Employers should cooperate in ensuring that essential historic scheme documentation remains identifiable and accessible, particularly when schemes are restructured or wound up.
4. Cooperation with investigations
Employers should have defined obligations to assist legitimate investigations into historic pension rights where they hold relevant evidence or information.
5. Accountability for their own failures
Where an employer breaches its own duties and that breach causes or materially contributes to an established financial loss, appropriate remedies should be available.
These principles would need to be tailored to different pension arrangements, including trust-based defined-benefit schemes, defined-contribution schemes, master trusts and contract-based workplace pensions.
The objective is not to make employers insurers of every pension risk.
It is to ensure that institutional responsibility is not allowed to disappear simply because the money has left payroll.
The regulator’s responsibility
The Pensions Regulator already expects trustees to maintain proper records and oversee administration.
Its guidance on winding up pension schemes recognises the importance of data quality, documentation and effective handovers between administrators.
That is welcome.
But we believe stronger protections are needed.
The regulator should investigate whether historic pension records are being adequately preserved, particularly for former members whose benefits have already been transferred.
It should also examine whether the responsibilities of sponsoring employers, trustees and administrators are sufficiently clear when a scheme changes structure or winds up.
And Parliament should consider whether current arrangements provide adequate remedies when essential evidence disappears.
This is not simply about record storage.
It is about the enforceability of pension promises.
Restoring accountability to deferred pay
When an employer fails to pay wages, we do not ordinarily tell the employee that the matter is irrelevant because the employer has changed payroll providers.
The employer remains responsible for its own wage obligations.
Pensions are legally different, particularly where benefits are held under independent trusts or contracts with pension providers.
But the comparison raises an important question.
Why should the institutional structure through which deferred remuneration is delivered make it so difficult for an employee to establish who is accountable when things go wrong?
We need pension arrangements that preserve both the rights and the evidence required to enforce them.
We need clear responsibility for institutional transitions.
And we need employers to recognise that offering a pension as part of remuneration creates a relationship of trust that should not be treated lightly.
An employer should not be able to promise a pension for life while treating its responsibility for that promise as necessarily ending on payday.
That is the principle we want Parliament to examine.
A call for evidence
Get SAFE is interested in hearing from people who have experienced difficulties establishing what happened to their workplace pension rights.
Have you been unable to obtain historic transfer records?
Have trustees or administrators been unable to explain what happened to your pension?
Has a former employer been unable or unwilling to help identify the institutions responsible for your pension arrangements?
Have you discovered that essential documents were not transferred when scheme administration changed?
We want to understand these experiences and identify recurring weaknesses in the system.
Individual cases deserve proper investigation. But they may also reveal failures that affect many more people.
Our campaign now rests on three connected principles:
Lifetime Pension Evidence Protection: Pension records should last as long as pension rights.
Continuity of Institutional Accountability: Changes of trustees, administrators or scheme structures should not extinguish responsibility for preserving essential evidence.
Employer Pension Stewardship: Employers should retain clearly defined responsibilities for the pension arrangements they establish or sponsor, proportionate to their powers, duties and conduct.
Together, these principles could help close an important gap in pension protection.
Because pensions are not simply financial products.
They are promises arising from a lifetime of work.
And those promises deserve a system capable of honouring them.
Get SAFE — Support After Financial Exploitation
Helping people recover evidence, understand their rights and challenge institutional failures.
Sources and further reading
- The Pensions Regulator — Employer record-keeping duties
- The Pensions Regulator — Pension scheme administration
- The Pensions Regulator — Winding up pension schemes
- HMRC — Responsibilities of a pension trustee
- The Pensions Regulator — General Code: Record keeping
This article proposes changes to UK pension law and governance. It does not suggest that employers are automatically liable for pension transfer fraud or independent trustee decisions. Legal responsibilities depend on the circumstances and applicable law.
