Pension Schemes Bill 2024-25: Progress of the bill

The government introduced the Pension Schemes Bill 2024–25 in the House of Commons on 5 June 2025. The bill’s second reading was held on 7 July 2025. It is listed for report stage in the Commons on 3 December 2025.

Most of the bill applies to England, Wales and Scotland.

When the bill was introduced, the measures in part 1, chapter 1 of the bill, relating to the Local Government Pension Scheme, did not apply to Scotland. Following a request from the Scottish Government, the government introduced amendments which extended clauses 1, 2, 4 and 7 to Scotland.

Occupational pensions are a reserved matter in Northern Ireland but some of the clauses extend to Northern Ireland.

According to the government’s impact assessment, the bill as introduced had 12 policies.

The bill received its second reading on 7 July 2025. During the debate, Pensions Minister Torsten Bell said that the aim of the bill was to deliver fundamental reforms to the UK’s pension landscape and to increase returns for pension savers. The most significant topics of debate at second reading stage were:

• Mandation and investment in the UK economy: ‘mandation’ refers to the government ‘mandating’ how pension schemes invest their assets, such as requiring schemes to invest a certain percentage of their assets in a particular type of asset class. MPs raised concerns about the implementation of clause 38 in the bill, and whether mandating investments would violate trustees’ fiduciary duty to savers and lead to worse investment outcomes.
• Pension adequacy: whether the government was taking action to address concerns that people aren’t saving enough for an adequate retirement.
• Local Government Pension Scheme: whether encouraging scale in the LGPS funds would actually lead to better investment outcomes, and whether consolidation could affect the ability of funds to support local communities through local investment opportunities.
• Pre-1997 pension indexation: whether the government would consider amending the bill to allow for pre-1997 pension indexation.

The bill was committed to a public bill committee without division.

A public bill committee took evidence and examined the bill across four sittings between 2 September 2025 and 11 September 2025.

A total of 307 amendments were tabled to the bill in public bill committee. 232 of these, all government amendments, were agreed to by the committee.

All opposition amendments were either withdrawn, not moved, or disagreed to in a division of the committee. The most significant new topics introduced to the bill through new clauses and amendments were:

• scheme manager powers
• employer duties to provide information to pension schemes
• alterations to salary-related, contracted-out pension schemes

Themes that led to significant debate in the committee included:

• Mandation: how investment mandation may interfere with pension trustees’ fiduciary duty to members, how the government would need to create a pipeline of suitable investment opportunities for the measures to work, and how mandation could affect asset markets.
• Defined benefit surplus flexibilities: how the government could ensure that measures on surplus release would be used to improve member benefits.