Pensions

(asked on 27th June 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether it is her Department's policy that pension schemes can already invest in funds with performance fees.


Answered by
Guy Opperman Portrait
Guy Opperman
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
This question was answered on 3rd July 2019

Private Pension schemes which are not used for automatic enrolment are free to invest in funds with performance fees.

To protect savers who are automatically enrolled into a pension scheme and make no choice of investment fund, the Government introduced a charge cap on 6 April 2015. Performance fees have always been subject to the charge cap. However, the way that schemes used for automatic enrolment verify compliance with the charge cap limits the use of most performance fees.

Earlier this year DWP consulted on proposals to extend the ways that pension schemes verify compliance with the charge cap to accommodate performance fees (https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/defined-contribution-pensions-investments-and-consolidation), as long as members invested over the whole year were not charged more than 0.75% of their funds under management or an equivalent combination charge.

Our consultation met with broad support. We are considering next steps, but we do not intend to remove performance fees – in any form – from the automatic enrolment charge cap.

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