In short: IGG, as trustee, has a fiduciary duty to act in members’ best interests. On the one issue members care about most — twelve years without an increase on pre-1997 pensions — IGG says it has “no discretion to exercise.” The power sits with the employer instead, who has “potential beneficiary” status in the very same document that describes the trustee’s duty to members. The Government’s own Pensions Minister has said trustees can and should use their position to secure indexation before releasing surplus. This article sets out, in IGG’s own words and the Minister’s, why a duty that sounds absolute in principle turns out to have almost nothing left to bite on in practice — and what the Association believes should change.

What Fiduciary Duty Actually Means

A pension trustee’s fiduciary duty is not a vague aspiration. It has specific, well-established content: to act in the best interests of beneficiaries, to treat different classes of beneficiary impartially, to exercise any discretion it holds properly — taking into account all relevant factors and ignoring irrelevant ones — and to be able to demonstrate how it has done so. IGG itself does not dispute any of this. Its own letters to the Association state it plainly: “the Trustee has a fiduciary duty to ensure that members receive their correct benefit entitlements.”

The difficulty is not with the duty. It is with what there is left for the duty to operate on.

“No Discretion to Exercise”

On pre-1997 discretionary increases, IGG’s position — set out in successive letters since October 2025 — is consistent and, on its own terms, straightforward. Rule 38.1 of the Plan allows the trustee to grant an increase to pre-1997 pensions “with the consent of the Participating Employer or at the request of the Participating Employer.” Rule 38.3 permits the employer to direct such an increase, but states explicitly that it “is under no obligation to do so.”

IGG's own words, from its 3 December 2025 IDRP decision, are worth reading in full:

“The Rules do not give the Trustee a unilateral ability to increase pensions or benefits. This means that the Trustee is not required to consider any factors relating to the exercise of a discretion, as it has no discretion to exercise in terms of providing discretionary increases in respect of pre-6 April 1997 pension. In a similar vein, there is no need for the Trustee to seek advice with regard to its decision-making (as there is no decision for it to make) or to consider funding levels or surplus utilisation.”

Read that carefully. IGG is not saying it considered the £484 million surplus, the twelve-year gap, and the real-terms erosion of pre-1997 pensions, and decided against an increase. It is saying it did not need to consider any of it — because, on its reading of the Rules, there was no decision for it to make at all. The fiduciary duty to act in members’ interests, on IGG’s own account, simply does not engage with this question. The power sits entirely with the employer, and the employer is under no obligation to use it.

The Sentence Worth Reading Twice

IGG's 3 December 2025 letter contains one further sentence that repays close attention. Having explained that it has no discretion to exercise on pre-1997 increases, IGG adds, almost as an aside:

“For completeness, where the Trustee does have a discretion to exercise it ensures fair and impartial treatment by taking account of all categories of Plan members and beneficiaries. In this context, it is worth noting that the Participating Employers are potential beneficiaries under the Plan.”

The document that describes the trustee's duty of impartial treatment between "all categories of Plan members and beneficiaries" is the same document that identifies the employer — the party that has declined every request for a pre-1997 increase since 2014 — as itself a beneficiary of the Plan. The Association does not suggest this is improper; the Participating Employers are, in a technical legal sense, entitled to surplus under the Rules in specified circumstances, and IGG is right to note it. But it illustrates precisely the structural tension at the heart of this issue: a duty of impartiality that must, by IGG's own account, weigh the interests of pensioners whose pensions have lost over a third of their real value since 2014 against the interests of the employer who caused that loss by declining to grant an increase — within a single framework of "impartial treatment."

What the Trustee Does Do

To be fair to IGG, its letters are consistent in describing one thing it does do: ask. IGG has confirmed that, “as a matter of good governance,” it approaches the Company “on both an annual and triennial basis… to ask it to consider payment of discretionary increases.” The Company's answer, every time since 2014, has been the same. In its letter of 4 February 2026 responding to the Association directly, J&J stated there was “no intention by the plan sponsor to amend the plan benefits by awarding a discretionary increase.” IGG's 3 July 2026 response confirmed this pattern continuing, most recently ahead of the April 2026 increase process, and explained the Company's position in its own words: its “global practice” is to provide inflation adjustments “only where it was legally required to do so.”

Asking is not nothing. But asking a question the answer to which the asker has no power to change is not the same as exercising a duty to act in members' interests. It is, at most, a duty to ask on members' behalf — which is a considerably smaller thing.

What the Minister Said

The Government's own position, set out by Pensions Minister Torsten Bell in a formal ministerial response to parliamentary correspondence in December 2025, points in a different direction entirely:

“Trustees will be in the driving seat in all decision making on surplus release and have a duty to act at all times in the interest of scheme beneficiaries. Employers will have no direct access to surplus funds and trustees are within their rights to request conditions that include the payment of discretionary indexation to members as part of any agreement which leads to the release of surplus to the employer.”

Read alongside IGG's position, the contrast is stark. The Minister's letter describes trustees as being “in the driving seat,” with a duty to act in beneficiaries' interests specifically in the context of surplus release — and states plainly that trustees can make discretionary indexation a condition of releasing surplus to the employer. The Minister further noted that the Pensions Regulator already expects trustees to consider the situation of members who would benefit from a discretionary increase and whether the scheme has a history of making such awards. This scheme has thirty years of such a history — four separate periodic catch-up increases between 2002 and 2014 alone.

Nothing in IGG's own account of the Rules as they currently stand prevents it from making exactly the kind of request the Minister describes as soon as the Pension Schemes Act 2026 surplus-release regulations come into force. The Rules give the trustee the power to request a pre-1997 increase. Nothing in them prevents the trustee from linking that request to its consent for any future surplus payment. Whether IGG intends to do so is not something this article can answer — the Association has formally asked, and awaits a response.

Members of Parliament corresponding independently with individual scheme members have reached a similar view. Replying to one member in July 2026, Euan Stainbank MP put the underlying logic plainly: “If Parliament has accepted that pre-1997 indexation protection matters enough to legislate for PPF members, that same logic does not disappear simply because a scheme happens to remain solvent. If anything, a scheme sitting on a substantial and growing surplus… is better placed to fund it than one in distress.” The same letter confirmed that Dame Nia Griffith and Peter Swallow had raised the pre-1997 indexation gap during the passage of the Pension Schemes Act 2026, and that ministers acknowledged the gap for non-PPF members without yet committing to close it.

The Floor, Not the Ceiling

IGG's 3 July 2026 response to the Association described its member engagement as being provided “where full member engagement is legally required.” That is a statement about the legal floor — the minimum the law compels. TPR's own General Code of Practice (March 2024) asks something different of governing bodies: to consider how member perspectives are taken into account in decision-making, not merely where the law happens to require it. The Government's December 2025 consultation on trustee governance went further still, acknowledging that members of schemes which have moved to a Professional Corporate Sole Trustee structure “may perceive that their voice is not being heard,” and asking directly how that gap should be addressed.

A duty to act in members' interests that operates only at the legal floor, on an issue where the trustee itself says it has no decision to make, is a duty with very little left for it to do.

Confirmed, Not Softened

IGG's response of 7 August 2026 confirms the position stated above, and goes further. Asked to consult the membership as planning for the Pension Schemes Act 2026 gets underway, IGG replied that it is “not currently considering any proposal relating to the payment or distribution of surplus assets,” and that, accordingly, “there is no requirement at the present time for the Trustee to undertake any consultation with the membership.” This is the legal-floor position stated as explicitly as it can be: no proposal currently exists, therefore no consultation duty currently applies.

The same letter also addressed the question of who the Association speaks for. Declining a request for a meeting, IGG stated that the Association's views “will be considered alongside any views received from other members and beneficiaries,” and that the Trustee “cannot accord any particular status or standing to the views of any individual member or group of members.” Whatever else this means, it confirms that an organised member association, writing formally and repeatedly on a matter of scheme-wide significance, is treated procedurally no differently from a single individual's letter. That is the practical reality behind the governance gap this article describes: not that anyone has acted improperly, but that there is currently no mechanism by which organised member representation carries any greater weight than its absence would.

What This Is Not Saying

To be precise, because it matters: this article does not allege that IGG has breached its fiduciary duty, or that it has acted unlawfully in any respect. On IGG's own reading of the Rules — which the Association has no reason to dispute as a matter of contractual interpretation — the trustee genuinely has no unilateral power to grant a pre-1997 increase. That is a structural feature of the Plan's Rules, not a failure of duty by the people currently administering it.

The Association's argument is different, and more precise. It is that the structure itself — a duty that exists in principle but has been narrowed, rule by rule, until it has almost nothing left to act on for the one issue members care about most — is exactly the kind of gap the Regulator's Code and the Government's own consultation say should not be allowed to persist without member engagement. The Minister's letter shows a path through it: trustees can request indexation as a condition of surplus release. The Association has asked IGG to confirm whether it intends to do so; IGG's response of 7 August did not address that question.

A duty to act in members' interests should mean something on the one question that matters most to them. Right now, on IGG's own account, it does not.

About This Document

This article is based entirely on official Plan documents, IGG's written correspondence with the Association and individual members (14 November 2025, 3 December 2025, 4 February 2026, 3 July 2026, and 7 August 2026), and the Minister for Pensions' formal ministerial response of December 2025.

References

  1. Ross Trustees Services Limited, email to a member of the Association, 12 November 2025.
  2. Ross Trustees Services Limited, IDRP decision letter to a member of the Association, 3 December 2025.
  3. Ross Trustees Services Limited, correspondence with a member, 13 December 2025 (referring to the annual/triennial request process and the April 2025 increase round); confirmed again in IGG's letter of 3 July 2026 for the April 2026 round.
  4. Ross Trustees Services Limited (IGG), written response to the Association, 3 July 2026.
  5. Torsten Bell MP, Minister for Pensions, ministerial response to parliamentary correspondence, c. December 2025. Circulated as a standard response to multiple MPs following constituent correspondence regarding discretionary indexation of defined benefit pension schemes.
  6. Euan Stainbank MP, letter to a member of the scheme, 9 July 2026 (case ref. ES8170).
  7. Ross Trustees Services Limited (IGG), written response to the Association, 7 August 2026.
  8. Ross Trustees Services Limited (IGG), written response to the Association, 7 August 2026.

This article is published by J&J Pensioners Network, an independent, volunteer-run organisation of members and beneficiaries of the Johnson & Johnson U.K. Group Retirement Plan (registration number 10127754). The Network is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Johnson & Johnson, any Participating Employer, Ross Trustees Services Limited (IGG), XPS Administration, or any professional adviser to the Plan. The name “J&J” is used solely as a descriptive reference to identify the pension scheme. The Network does not provide financial, legal, tax, investment, actuarial, or retirement planning advice. Nothing in this article should be read as an allegation that any party has acted unlawfully or in breach of duty; it sets out the Association's analysis of publicly available and member-provided correspondence. Any information shared is believed to be accurate as at 7 August 2026. Members should always refer to official scheme communications and seek independent professional advice before making any decisions about their pension. The Network welcomes correction of any factual inaccuracy in writing to info@jnjpensioners.org.uk. © J&J Pensioners Network, August 2026.