The Society of Pension Consultants (SPC) has argued that the UK government should give the Pensions Regulator (TPR) more resources to engage with individual schemes, instead of forcing it to consider an additional statutory objective.
Responding to the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) proposal to introduce a new statutory objective for the regulator – one that would require it to explicitly consider the impact of deficit reduction payments on a sponsoring company's health – the SPC noted that the regulator had already taken this into account.
John Mortimer, the organisation's secretary, said: "The requirement on the regulator to protect the position of the Pension Protection Fund (PPF) already leads it to lend due weight to long-term affordability of deficit recovery plans to sponsoring employers". Summarising its members' responses on the issue, the SPC also warned that a new objective would risk compounding the "misalignment" present in the regulator's existing objectives.
The society suggested that, in place of a new objective, TPR should be given further resources to participate actively in a greater number of recovery plan negotiations. It noted that the "restricted" level of resources available at present forced the regulator to issue general statements "which can be difficult to apply to specific valuation processes". "If the regulator had the resources to directly engage with more schemes during their valuation process, solutions on deficit recovery more directly applicable to specific employers and schemes would probably be easier to find, without a further statutory objective", it said.
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