Trustee Good Practice Guide
The role of the trustees
Whether you are lay or professional trustees, your duties are set out in law and in your scheme rules. The PPF assessment process will place extra obligations on you to ensure that your scheme completes the process successfully.
Together with your advisors, we expect you to have the necessary skills (detailed later in this section) for taking a scheme through the assessment period and that you have an overview of the legal environment in which we have to work. If you or your advisors need extra help then refer to the Pensions Regulator’s Trustee toolkit ‘DB Scheme: Insolvent Employer’ module on their website.
You need to recognise and accept that as trustees of a scheme in the assessment period, you will be taking on a significant increase in workload compared with the normal day-to-day duties involved in managing a pension scheme.
Section 3 detailed the key activities for trustees that are specific to the assessment period. While you are ultimately responsible for making sure these activities are carried out, we recognise that you will delegate the task of carrying out some of these activities to your advisors. As trustees, you will still remain responsible for making sure they are carried out appropriately.
Also, we expect trustees to make sure that there is a framework in place throughout the assessment period that ensures all activities and stakeholders (including your advisors) are co-ordinated, informed, managed and proactively communicated in an effective and efficient manner.
We have outlined in this section the key skills which we believe are fundamental to delivering and supporting this framework. These, along with the application of the key principles explained in section 4, should ensure that you have an appropriate framework in place to successfully deliver your scheme through the assessment period. These are not exhaustive and we encourage you to expand your skills and knowledge as much as you can.