Reading Between the Lines

Why We Are Looking at This

The Department for Work and Pensions consulted over the summer on new rules that will make it easier for well-funded defined benefit schemes, like ours, to release surplus to employers. The Association submitted its own response, covered in our article “What We Told the Government.” IGG, as our scheme’s trustee, has also submitted a response — both a formal written submission and a shorter LinkedIn summary of it.

IGG’s submission is a public document, written by professionals who manage over £320 billion across 500+ pension scheme appointments. It is worth reading carefully, not because IGG has done anything improper by responding — they are entitled to, and their perspective as trustees is a legitimate one for the Government to hear — but because what a party chooses to emphasise, and what it chooses not to mention, is itself informative.

What IGG Argued — In Its Own Words

1. Member security should be the overriding priority

IGG’s executive summary states plainly that it supports the policy of giving trustees more flexibility over surplus, “provided that member security remains the overriding priority.” It goes further than the draft regulations in one respect: it argues the proposed low dependency funding test should be a “reasonable statutory minimum,” not “the default standard for surplus release in every case” — in other words, IGG is asking the Government to make it harder, not easier, to justify releasing surplus at the legal minimum.

“We support the policy objective of giving trustees of well-funded defined benefit schemes greater flexibility to consider the use of surplus, provided that member security remains the overriding priority and trustee decision-making remains independent, scheme-specific and properly advised.”

This is a genuinely cautious, member-conscious position, and it is worth acknowledging as such. It also cites IGG’s own industry research finding two-thirds of corporate scheme sponsors want a funding buffer above the legal minimum — evidence, in IGG’s telling, that caution is the responsible position across the industry.

2. “Reasonable expectation to share in surplus” — a phrase worth keeping

Separately, in IGG’s own direct correspondence with the Association on 3 July 2026, IGG named “the extent to which members have a reasonable expectation to share in surplus” as a relevant factor in any future surplus decision. That is IGG’s own language, not the Association’s — and it sits well alongside the documented history our own articles set out: a tradition of discretionary increases on this scheme dating back to at least 1984, described in the Trustees’ own 1994 newsletter as “at least the 10th straight year” of such awards.

3. Appropriate advice should come from the trustees’ own advisers

IGG’s submission asks the Government to make clear that “appropriate advice” for a surplus decision must be “advice obtained by the trustees from advisers appointed by the trustees,” not advice supplied by the employer. IGG explains why this matters: “surplus release involves strong employer interest,” and trustees “must be able to take independent advice that is directed to their duties and to the interests of members.” We agree with this principle. We would ask, in turn, whether it has been consistently applied to the question of pre-1997 discretionary increases on our own scheme — a question on which, IGG has told us in writing, it has “no discretion to exercise” at all, because the power sits with the employer.

What IGG Asked For — Protection for Itself

The most striking theme in IGG’s submission, repeated in three separate places — the executive summary, the “key themes” list, and again in the body of the response — is a request for statutory protection against trustee replacement:

“We have significant concerns that trustees could be replaced where they do not agree to, or propose, a surplus release, or where proposals do not align with the sponsor’s own views. We urge the Government to consider what safeguards may be appropriate to protect trustee independence.”

IGG goes further still, asking TPR to set out “how it might react where it sees reports of surplus being released only to the sponsor, coinciding with notification of a change of trustee board” — in plain terms, asking the Regulator to watch for employers replacing an inconvenient trustee with one who will approve the payment they want.

This is, in our view, a reasonable thing for IGG to ask for. A trustee who can be removed for saying no to an employer is not really independent. We do not dispute the principle.

What One Member Was Told — Before the Association Existed

This is not a hypothetical question. In October 2025 — some months before the Association was formally constituted — an individual member wrote to Aptia, and then to the Trustee, asking for a neutral communication to be circulated to pensioner and deferred members with pre-1997 benefits, on the absence of discretionary increases since January 2014. The Trustee declined, and the member took the matter through the scheme’s Internal Dispute Resolution Procedure. The complaint was not upheld.

The Trustee’s decision letter of 3 December 2025 gave two reasons for the refusal. The first was data protection: the Trustee argued that circulating a communication “on behalf of someone else,” relating to benefits beyond those set out in the Plan Rules, would be inconsistent with its obligations to only use members’ personal data for administering the Plan. The second was that doing so would take the Trustee “outside the scope of its powers.”

We think the data protection reasoning does not withstand much scrutiny: the Trustee already holds and lawfully uses members’ contact details to send routine scheme communications; a factual, neutral communication about the scheme’s own indexation history is not obviously different in kind. We make no finding on this — we simply note that the objection was not, in our reading, well explained. The second reason — that this would exceed the Trustee’s proper role — is at least coherent with how a PCST is generally expected to operate, even if one might reasonably disagree with where that line is drawn.

We raise this not to relitigate an individual complaint, but because it is a useful, concrete illustration of the asymmetry IGG’s own DWP submission does not mention: when the employer disagrees with a proposed course of action, IGG wants the Government to build in statutory protection against the consequences. When an individual member disagreed with the Trustee’s own decision, the mechanism available was an internal complaints process run by the Trustee itself, which the Trustee decided in its own favour.

On Member Notification — A Second Gap

IGG’s submission also raises a fair, practical question about the draft rules on notifying members before a surplus payment is made:

“The regulations or guidance should explain how trustees should deal with member representations, objections or complaints where members disagree with a proposed surplus release. If the requirement is intended to be notification only, the rationale for a three-month period is unclear.”

This is, in fact, close to the point the Association made in its own submission — we argued that notification after a decision has been made is a courtesy, not a safeguard, and that members should be consulted before a payment is agreed. IGG asks the Government to clarify what notification is actually for. We would go a step further and ask that the answer be “a genuine opportunity to be heard,” not simply “a clearer explanation of why the decision has already been made.”

Worth noting, too, is IGG’s specific concern that member objections could create “a significant administrative burden, particularly given the increasing use of AI to generate complaint letters.” We read this as a fair operational concern for the industry as a whole, not a comment on our own membership — but it is a reminder that, in this framework, member engagement is being planned for primarily as a risk to be managed, rather than a resource that improves decision-making.

Our Assessment

IGG’s submission is not a hostile document, and we do not read it as one. Several of its positions — caution about the low dependency threshold, independent advice for trustees, clarity on notification — are ones the Association broadly welcomes, and in places IGG has gone further than we expected in asking the Government to be cautious about how quickly and how automatically surplus should flow to employers.

What the submission does not do is turn that same instinct for caution and protection inward, toward the members whose pensions the surplus was built from. IGG asks for the Government to protect trustees from being removed by an unhappy employer. It does not ask for members to have any equivalent standing, voice, or protection where they disagree with a trustee’s decision — including, on our own scheme, a decision not to circulate a communication that a member had directly asked for.

We think this is worth members understanding clearly, in plain terms: the safeguards being discussed in this consultation are, so far, a conversation between trustees, employers and the Regulator about how power should be balanced between those three parties. Members are, for the most part, still the subject of that conversation rather than a participant in it — a point our own submission to the DWP made directly, and one this comparison, we think, only reinforces.

About This Document

This article quotes directly from IGG’s own published consultation response and LinkedIn post, both publicly available documents, for the purpose of fair comment. It does not allege that IGG has acted unlawfully or in breach of any duty. Where the Association draws inferences or asks questions, these are the Association’s own view, offered in good faith.