Before I call the noble Lord, Lord Davies, I point out to the Committee that there is an error on the Marshalled List, in that Amendment 30 is to Clause 10 and not Clause 9, as it says here. It makes no practical difference to the debate, but it will do when we call the amendments later.
Clause 9: Power to modify scheme to allow for payment of surplus to employer
This group raises important issues about the purpose of these proposed changes to the legislation on pension schemes. I am going to move my Amendment 23 and speak to my Amendments 25, 27, 28, 29 and 30—and I thank the Chairman for the correction. I look forward to the speech of the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, on his Amendment 26, which on the face of it asks a perfectly valid question.
The main amendment in this group, Amendment 25, seeks clarification from my noble friend the Minister about the purpose of Part 1, Chapter 2 of the Bill. This chapter is headed
“Powers to pay surplus to employer”.
Other than that, the Bill and the Explanatory Notes are silent on why the law is being changed. I will come back to that, but first I will address my Amendments 23, 27, 28, 29 and 30, which simply seek a change in the terminology used in the Bill, leaving out the word “surplus” and inserting the word “assets” instead.
I make no apologies for what may appear a pedantic point. Words are important. Later amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, would also change the wording, so I think that there is an understanding that words are important, but what do I mean in this specific case? Let us consider the difference from the point of view of a scheme member between being told that their employer has taken some surplus from their pension fund and hearing the statement that their employer has taken some assets from their pension fund. I believe that the latter statement is a much better reflection of what is happening. “Surplus” suggests that the money is not needed, which is never true in a pension scheme; “assets” suggests something far more concrete.
It is worth emphasising that there is no certain meaning of what constitutes a surplus. It is not a technical term in actuarial speak; it was not a word that I ever used when advising pension schemes as a scheme actuary. It is widely used in general conversation—I sometimes use it myself—but it does not appear in the technical actuarial guidance, except as required by a cross-reference to legislation on surpluses. I suggest that using the word “assets” is a much clearer and more honest reflection of what is happening and I urge my noble friend the Minister to accept the change.
My Lords, I will briefly intervene because the probing amendments here are important to how we look at the precise nature of surpluses. Clearly, the principle of making it easier to return a genuine pension scheme surplus to employers is worthy of support, particularly given how much has historically been paid by employers into DB schemes, often at the expense of capital investment. But safeguards are absolutely critical—this is the point I want to make about the relationship between employers and trustees in this area. It must be a trustee decision to distribute surplus, and trustees must be required to consider how the surplus has accumulated, as was touched on by the proposer. Was it due to employer contributions, member contributions or strong investment returns?
Under the proposed legislation, employers will no doubt apply immense pressure to steer the distribution towards them and not the members. In exercising their discretion, trustees must be unencumbered, properly advised and protected from the undue and inappropriate pressure that sponsoring employers will no doubt place on them. That is a real concern to me. We must be wary of employers exercising their powers to put in place weak trustees, who will not act in members’ best interests. We must also be wary of making it harder for trustees to distribute surplus to members in favour of employers.
Surplus distributed to members through increased benefits will directly improve the position of the real economy through increased domestic expenditure and of course increased tax receipts. If we are to restrict the use of surplus assets away from scheme memberships to employers, we must ensure that surplus distributed to them is used for reinvestment in the UK economy through capital expenditure. I would like to hear the Minister’s view on that.
On what a surplus is, the changes made by the Pensions Regulator to the DB funding code of practice in November 2024 have codified the requirement for pension scheme trustees to fund DB pension schemes very prudently—I think that those are the words that he used. Further, the investments that trustees are strongly encouraged to hold, through that code of practice, mean that the investment strategies are usually much lower risk than the insurance companies that many pension schemes are now being transferred to en masse under bulk annuity contracts.
My Lords, we come to three groups of amendments. The next two deal with what you might do with the surplus, and I have amendments in those. This group deals with the principle of what a surplus is. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, for giving us the chance to consider that.
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I have to say that, whenever I hear or see “surplus”, either spoken or in reference to a pension fund, I immediately put it in quotation marks because, as the noble Lord, Lord Davies, said, it has no defined meaning and there is no great certainty as to exactly what it is; it is a best guesstimate at a certain moment in time, and both sides of the equation are very open to movement. For example, in the fund with which I am involved, the surplus went from 120% to 150% in just over a month because two different calculations were done. This was almost entirely due to the liabilities having been reduced; the surplus grew because the amount of the liabilities went down. Equally, the surplus contains the interest on the previous surplus, which is also calculated as part of how it is looked at. Many factors come into it, including the make-up of the discount rate used and the strength of the employer’s covenant. So, in looking at this matter, I have huge sympathy with the noble Lord’s proposition that we would be better off using “assets”, rather than “surplus”.
For me, what is at the heart of all this—I should make it clear that I am wholly in favour of the idea of using excess surplus, if that does not introduce another set of inverted commas, as it most certainly does—is that I have absolutely no problem with an appropriate amount of a surplus being available to be used. However, as I will argue in our debate on the next group, it should be equitably used between the members of the scheme and the employers. I reiterate the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Davies: the problem with this being a skeleton Bill, with none of the regulations involved, is that it is quite possible that, when the Secretary of State comes to lay regulations under Clause 10, many of the points that we are making may be taken care of, but we do not know that at the moment because we have not seen any draft and we do not know what will actually be in those regulations.
At present, nothing in this Bill fulfils the objective for funds to go into British investment. I read with interest on page 6 of the Explanatory Notes:
“This measure allows trustees of DB schemes to modify their scheme rules to share surplus funds with their sponsoring employer, and support business investment. Through this change, trustees will also be better placed to negotiate with sponsoring employers to get additional benefits from surplus for scheme members”.
I quite agree with both those objectives but, at present, they are not in the Bill. Therefore, I am looking for comfort from the Minister that they will appear either in the Bill, in one of the ways being suggested, or in the regulations when we come to them.
These are my questions on this group of amendments, which is about the principle behind the surplus. How much of a surplus is surplus surplus? At 110% to 120%, if you have a major correction in the markets, you could undoubtedly lose that in a year—not actually but notionally. How much of a surplus is available to be released? How do we deal with putting guard-rails around that, as the noble Lord mentioned? Who shares that surplus? How much goes to the employer and, most importantly, how much goes to the members? How much of either of that will ultimately go into investment? For me, the important questions are: what are the guard-rails; what will be done with it; and how do we get the best out of it?
My Lords, I will say a little more in our debate on the next group about how surpluses should be used, but we must recognise that employers in defined benefit schemes underwrite defined benefit scheme finances; they are the ones who have been putting in very large sums of money to keep these schemes going for the past 20-odd years. It is only right that we should recognise the interest that employers have in taking money that is no longer required within a scheme.
We have had so many years of deficits in pension schemes that we have rather forgotten that this was like an everyday happening in the pensions world, if you go back to the 1990s, when surpluses arose. Indeed, pension schemes were not allowed to keep pension surpluses; there were HMRC rules which made that rather difficult to do. These were perfectly ordinary transactions in the pensions world which we have just forgotten about because of the deficits that have existed for the last 20 or 30 years, which employers—not employees—have had to bear the burden of.
On the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Davies, I understand the technical point about removing assets rather than surplus, but surplus is the language that has always been used in the context of pension schemes; it is in the 1995 Act. The noble Lord’s amendments amend only this Act; as I understand it, they do not go on and amend the earlier Act. It is just language that has been used for a long period; I think people know what it means, and it will be very confusing at this stage to change the language.
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Davies, for putting these amendments down and speaking in detail about them. We also heard good words from the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, and the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes. I almost thought, “Is there any point in getting up and speaking?” but I am a politician.
This group goes to first principles. What is a defined benefits pension surplus and what is it for? For us, DB surplus is not a windfall or an accident, as I think others have said. It is a result of long-term assumptions, member contributions, employer funding decisions and investment outcomes—all those—but above all, it exists within a framework of promises made to members in return for deferred pay. We are therefore concerned about renaming—we keep on coming back to this—“surplus” as simply “assets” available for redistribution.
Language matters here because it shapes both legal interpretation and member confidence. Treating surpluses as inherently extractable risks weakening the fundamental bargain that underpins DB provision. Our position is not that surplus should never be accessed, but that it should be considered only after members’ reasonable expectations have been fully protected. That includes confidence in benefits security, protection against inflation erosion, and trust and accrued rights not being retrospectively interpreted. I have always thought that with DB pensions you need prudence. How far do prudence and good governance go?
Finally, the question for Ministers is whether the Bill maintains the principle that DB schemes exist first and foremost to deliver promised benefits or whether it marks a shift towards viewing schemes as financial reservoirs once minimum funding tests are met. In that case, one has to think, “What is the minimum for the funding tests?” We shall come on to that in an amendment that the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, has put down later in the Bill on where companies fail. It is a question of when those surpluses are available, if they are ever available.
My Lords, when I entered the department in July 2019, defined benefit pension schemes did, on occasion, report surpluses. However, those surpluses were neither of the scale nor the character that we are now observing. If one looks back over the past quarter of a century and beyond, it is evident that both the funding position of defined benefit schemes and the methodologies used to assess that funding have changed materially.
The surpluses reported today are not simply large in absolute terms but different in nature. They are measured against significantly more prudent assumptions, particularly in relation to discount rates, longevity and asset valuation, than would have been applied historically. It is therefore right that these emerging surpluses are examined with care and transparency. Bringing them into the open is necessary, and I say at the outset that the Government are right to have raised this issue explicitly in the Bill.
That said, we consider that the Bill does not yet fully reflect a number of the practical and operational issues faced by both trustees and sponsoring employers when seeking to make effective use of those provisions. In that respect, our position is not materially distant from that of the Government. Our concerns are not ones of principle but of application and implementation. We recognise that issues relating to potential deadlock between trustees and sponsors are important, but we are content for those matters to be considered at a later stage in the Committee’s proceedings. Our immediate focus is on understanding how the proposals are intended to operate in practice, how decisions are expected to be taken within existing scheme governance arrangements and how these new powers interact with established trustee fiduciary duties and employer covenant considerations.
This is a busy group, and noble Lords have done a sterling job in setting out their reasoning and rationale. I shall, therefore, not detain the Committee further by relitigating those points but will speak to my Amendment 25 in this group. Like a number of our amendments in this part of the Bill, it is a probing amendment intended to seek clarity. Clause 9 inserts new Section 36B into the Pensions Act 1995. The new section gives trustees of defined benefit trustee schemes the ability by resolution to modify the schemes’ rules so as to confirm a power to pay surplus to the employer or to remove or relax existing restrictions on the exercise of such a power.
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Davies of Brixton and the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, for explaining their amendments, and to all noble Lords, who have spoken so concisely—we positively cantered through that group; may that continue throughout the day.
It is worth saying a word about the Government’s policy intent, but let me start by saying that the DB landscape has changed dramatically, a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott. Schemes are currently enjoying high levels of funding. Three in four schemes are running a surplus and there is around £160 billion of surplus funds in the DB universe. Schemes are also now more mature. The vast majority minimise the risk of future volatility with investment strategies that protect against interest rate and inflation movements. In addition, the DB funding code and the underpinning legislation require trustees to aim to maintain a strong funding position so that they can pay members’ future pensions. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, that is the primary purpose of DB funding schemes: above all, they must be able to pay members’ pensions. That is what is set out quite clearly in the DB funding code and the underpinning legislation. That is overseen by the Pensions Regulator.
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Amendment 24 was tabled to make it clear that the intended purpose of releasing assets is to be for the benefit of scheme members as much as for the benefit of scheme sponsors—if not more, in my view. As mentioned, there is no indication in legislation of why scheme assets might be released. What are the purposes for which surplus assets will be released? What is the purpose of the change in legislation and the facilitation of such release? It is left entirely in the hands of scheme trustees exercising their fiduciary duty. Government Ministers during the passage of the Bill have made reference to that on numerous occasions.
However, I believe that this is highly problematic. Experience tells us that we cannot rely on all trustees to interpret the appropriate purposes of the release of assets. It has to be in the Bill. The title of the chapter,
“Powers to pay surplus to employer”,
illustrates the problem. I have been advised by the clerks that it is not possible to amend those parts of the Bill, but it simply reflects the content of that particular chapter. As I said, this illustrates the problem. It only talks about the employer but says nothing about scheme members.
The absence of any reference to scheme members in the Bill contrasts with what Ministers have told us on numerous occasions. There has been a consistent message from Ministers throughout the passage of this Bill that the change will be of benefit to members. On the release of surplus, ministerial statements have suggested consistently that it is intended that members will share in the benefits of releasing assets. For example, my noble friend the Minister said at Second Reading,
“the Bill introduces powers to enable more trustees of well-funded defined benefit, or DB, schemes to share some of the £160 billion of surplus funds to benefit sponsoring employers and members”.
So it is not just about employers. In the Government’s own words, it is about members as well as employers. My noble friend went on to say:
“The measure will allow trustees, working with employers, to decide how surplus can benefit both members and employers, while maintaining security for future pensions ”.—[Official Report, 18/12/25; col. 875.]
Scheme members hearing this must assume that, if the employer benefits from a release of assets, they will as well. But there is nothing in the Bill that will make that happen. The Minister for Pensions made a similar statement many times. He has argued consistently, and rightly, that the release of assets—surpluses, if you will—is not just about employers but about delivering better benefits for scheme members.
Look, for example, at the Government’s road map for pensions. It states under the heading “Surplus flexibilities”:
“We will allow well-funded … pension schemes to safely release some of the £160 billion surplus funds to be reinvested across the UK economy and to improve outcomes for members”.
But there is nothing in the Bill that delivers on that promise. The DWP press statement about the Bill said:
“New freedoms to safely release surplus funding will unlock investments and benefit savers”.
Again, there is nothing in the Bill.
Then we find a statement by the Minister for Pensions on 4 September during Committee on the Bill in the Commons:
“It is crucial that the new surplus flexibilities work for both sponsoring employers and members”.—[Official Report, Commons, Pension Schemes Bill Committee, 4/9/25; col. 130.]
Yet again, there is nothing in the Bill. I could go on—there are plenty of examples—but I hope that I have made the point.
If that is the case and the intention is that members as well as scheme sponsors are expected to benefit when assets are released, this objective should be set out clearly in the Bill. This is particularly important because the Bill, as drafted, removes the existing requirement on trustees only to release surplus where this is in the interests of members. We will come to this again when we reach Amendment 37 in the name of the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso. I will support that amendment, but I think that it would be better to put the requirement for members to benefit as well as employers clearly and unambiguously in Clause 9. A defined benefit scheme is a joint endeavour, involving both employees and employer. They should be treated on an equal basis. I ask my noble friend the Minister to accept the point and bring forward a suitable amendment on Report. I beg to move.
In June 2025, the Pensions Regulator issued guidance that suggested that excessive prudence or hoarding of surplus could be considered poor governance by trustees. If we are to make it easier to distribute surplus from pension schemes, the bar for that should not be so low that the security of member benefits is weakened and it should not be so high that it requires schemes to be excessively funded. The current bar of buyout funding is, in my opinion, far too high.
Safeguards are important. It is absolutely critical that trustees are required to take appropriate advice and that actuarial advice is compliant at all times with the relevant technical actuarial standards. Trustees must be able to make informed, evidence-based decisions, unencumbered by the interests of the insurance industry and free from undue employer pressure. That particular relationship concerns me most in our probe into the functions of the surpluses. I hope that the Minister can give reassurances about the position of trustees—how they will be protected and by whom—in this particular contest or area of decision-making.
The clause contains one explicit limitation on that power. New Section 36B(4) provides that the section does not apply to a scheme that is being wound up. In other words, wind-up is the only circumstance singled out in the Bill in which the new surplus release modification power cannot be used. Amendment 25 would remove that specific exclusion, and I want to be clear that the purpose of doing so is not to argue that surplus should be released during winding-up; rather, it is to test the Government’s reasoning in identifying wind-up as the sole circumstance meriting an explicit prohibition in primary legislation.
By proposing to remove subsection (4), the amendment invites the Minister to explain whether the Government consider wind-up to be genuinely the only situation in which surplus release would be inappropriate or whether there are other circumstances where the use of this power would also be unsuitable. If those other safeguards are already captured elsewhere, it would be helpful for the Committee to have that clearly set out on the record. Equally, if wind-up is used here as a proxy for a broader set of concerns, the Committee would benefit from understanding why those concerns are not addressed more directly.
Surplus release is a sensitive issue. The way in which the boundaries of this new power are framed therefore matters. Where the Bill chooses to draw a line in the legislation, it invites scrutiny as to why that line has been drawn there and only there. This amendment is intended to facilitate that discussion and to elicit reassurance from the Minister about how the Government envisage this power operating in practice and what protections they consider necessary beyond the single case of wind-up. On that basis, I look forward to the Minister’s response and any clarification she can provide to the Committee.