Pension SuperHaven is pleased to announce its formal launch as an Occupational Pension Scheme. The Pension SuperHaven Trustees look forward to accepting transfers in from individuals’ pension pots, offering scheme members the safety, security and good governance which they require and deserve. The new structure for each pensioner concerned is to ensure a

“secure monthly pension for life, with shared upside.”

Pension SuperHaven intends to provide elective pension members with a pension for life, but also with the added benefit of sharing in the upside of any investment out-performance. Pension SuperHaven is currently in active dialogue with multiple companies and funds of significant size.

Specifically, in respect of the former British Steel workers, the new structure could offer pensioner victims of the historic IFA scandal the chance to move what remains of their pension pots into an Occupational Pension Scheme, already registered with HMRC. This is essentially as a ‘reverse transfer’ from a personal pension pot into a Defined Benefit pension scheme. Steelworkers would also have the help of an analytical tool to compare the Pension SuperHaven and open market annuity rates. This targeted support will be provided by AgeWage who will work in partnership with existing advisers. The Pension SuperHaven scheme would, in effect, put the affected members back to where they should have been.

Henry Tapper, CEO of AgeWage, commented, 

“yesterday research from Hymans Robertson found that that 75% of DC savers aged 55 or over would find it helpful for their DC savings to automatically start paying them an income when they reached their point of retirement”

Edi Truell

Henry Tapper

Edi Truell, Co-Founder of Pension SuperHaven, added:

“Over the past 18 months, the Pension SuperHaven team have been working tirelessly behind the scenes with both regulators and representatives of the British Steel workers to deliver a much-needed solution. We are now delighted to be able to provide the backstop ‘safety capital’. We are confident that Pension SuperHaven will provide proper comfort to many ex-steelworkers after this long-standing debacle as well as for other companies in the market.”

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When Tata Steel closed the British Steel Pension Scheme (BSPS) in December 2016, the future prospects of 130,000 scheme members were thrown into turmoil. Some chose to go onto a new scheme, whilst others sought refuge on reduced benefits in the pensions lifeboat, the Pension Protection Fund (PPF). But a third, 7,700-strong cohort were, in many cases, given unsuitable advice to transfer their benefits out of the BSPS defined benefit (“DB”) pension fund by financial advisers who acted with a lack of due skill and care or even with a lack of integrity. Many were, in the words of the Financial Times in 2017, “fed to the sharks”[1].

Years on, the British Steel Pension scandal needs a solution that helps put steelworkers back essentially to where they should have been. Pension SuperHaven has been contacted by representatives on behalf of many former scheme members who were mis-sold the idea of transferring out, to see whether anything can be done to address those former scheme members’ broke pension promises. As well as having on record, in 2016 and 2017, that the Pension SuperHaven co-founders, Edi Truell and Luke Webster, had advised that the Tata-driven proposal for British Steel was flawed[2]. Pension SuperHaven now intends to ‘do the right thing’ for 7,700 people who transferred out on poor terms.

Pension SuperHaven is backed by capital provided by pension experts; and moreover 21% of the capital comes from the UK charity, the Truell Conservation Foundation. The registered charity was founded by Edi Truell and his late brother, Danny, CIO of the Wellcome Trust charity, to ‘make money for charity by being good investors’. Rescuing the British Steel pensioners builds on its history of the Truell brothers and their charitable activities, including being the original founders of Pension Insurance Corporation, which now looks after hundreds of thousands of pensioners’ benefits.

Following the investigations by Parliament and regulators into the transfer values paid out to certain members of the BSPS and the requirements for redress, Pension SuperHaven is now proposing a solution. There is a latent demand to try to restore the steelworkers’ defined benefits, but no legal route for former BSPS members to enter the PPF, which the ‘old’ BSPS exited on a PPF+ basis while the new BSPS has also declined to take transfers in.

As an occupational pension scheme, the Pension SuperHaven Trustees can accept transfers in from individuals’ pension pots. Pension SuperHaven will offer a simple and straightforward benefit schedule, with options for spouses also to have a pension. Members don’t have to have retired; they can opt for a deferred pension. Those that have yet to reach retirement age keep their ‘pension freedoms’, so can essentially change their mind in the future.

Pension SuperHaven members would be eligible to participate in our member ‘shared outcome’ arrangements, whereby they share in the investment performance of Pension SuperHaven.

Pension SuperHaven envisages working with the FCA, MaPS, FOS and TPAS to ensure comprehensive, impartial guidance is given to those ‘orphan’ members of BSPS; and any redress due is optimised for their individual circumstances.

Pension SuperHaven believes it can offer those scheme members the safety, security, and good governance which they should enjoy.

A ’pension for life, with shared upside.’

[1] Financial Times, ‘Port Talbot steelworks allegedly targeted by pension sharks’, 2017

[2] https://news.sky.com/story/city-financier-seeks-tata-steel-pensions-role-amid-solvency-row-10731658