I’m a policyholder with L&G and have just over £600,000 having taken over £180,000 this time last year to pay off my mortgage.

The IGC is my means of understanding what is going on at L&G and I’m looking forward to looking into the various areas in which the Independent Governance Committee look for value for my money.

The report is no longer a PDF but a aeries of click throughs on an interractive version of the page above.

The people who do the work in assessing the value are well known to me, but not I suspect to many policyholders. To be honest I’d forgotten they were anything to do with it and you wonder when policyholders in their sixties who are about to become dependent on their savings are going to get to know their views – unless they go and find out what’s going on.

Here they are

I go to my L&G website most weeks to find out something or other (usually to find the value of my pot). A trip to my pension site does not give me any advertisement of the IGC’s report. The report must have been published recently but there is no indication that it has been published.

I think this a shame, not least because the IGC report is my value for money assessment and the cost of doing this work , paying these people and managing matters for next year is born by policyholders and the very charges under investigation.

There is nothing to discover on google for the report, I do not think that any non specialist L&G personal pension owner would know that the publication must be produced by September 30th 2025 and deal with information ending at 31st December 2024

Let’s take at random three of the modules set out above

The total IGC report for 2025 van be accessed here – the link’s the download

We can start with Joanne Segars’s report which expands on the statement that L&G are offering good value for money. This is a very substantial document and is rather less than transparent, here is an example.

This comparison shows that the costs and
charges are very competitive. L&G has continued to invest in
improvements (such as the L&G Appand planning tools) that
increase the overall value for members, and it has not increased
the charges that you pay.

I very much doubt many people haven’t worked out the more people can do using an app, the less expensive are direct interactions with those people. In 2000 I remember my company – Eagle Star told its parent that it would make money over time by getting customers self-administer on-line. Coincidentally, L&G operate their GPP on an old Eagle Star we didn’t think fit for purpose.

Independent research

An independent comparison report was commissioned to
compare the costs and charges that you pay L&G to those paid
by members of other providers’ workplace pension schemes.
Groups of similar sized employers, across a range of different
types of investments, were used for the comparison of costs
and charges. L&G performed well across all categories and
the report shows that the costs and charges that you pay are
generally in line with, or better than, the average.
Our assessment is that the costs and charges you pay are
highly competitive and reflect good value for money.

The document is not available for policyholders to see, we get no other companies compared – either better or worse. I am afraid this does not look the kind of translation policyholders need to feel reassured that costs of funds, administrations and transactions are “excellent”.

This is what is taken out of my plan each month, this is the kind of information that is excellent to have

Investment

Similarly we could do with the amount of money we have made or lost  each month. Instead we get a vague chart showing me a fund I’m not in and how it is performing against other GPPS and Master Trusts

The lowest performing fund is the red one, it may not have taken much risk but it retrned less than 4% return compared with other default funds over 10% pa. How can we consider this “good” as the chart indicates.

Here are MAF returns from the report, MAF is nowhere near the typical growth fund (developed equity fund at the bottom)

I am sorry to have to moan but L&G customers have to choose to get value. L&G are very good at telling me how many units I have and what my funds are doing

What I’d like to know the value I’m getting for my money is what the internal rate of return I’ve got on these two funds I invest 50% in each. I have a programme I use which compares my return to that of the MAF fund (the red one) and I’m able to compare all my holdings against the average workplace placing default fund (with information from Hymans Robertson). If the L&G IGC board would like to have the report I give myself , I will be happy to show them it. But I am afraid it does not give good VFM for the MAF default (the red one).

I will not have space to test all the VFM modules that Joanne Segars’ team have put together but am comfortable that more could be done to provide people with information that mattered to policyholders.

State of the art report

I am impressed by the 2025 report in terms of useability. I can confirm that my dealings with L&G’s admin was high quality and I think I have reasonable value for money (though my costs could be cheaper with the same funds with Pension Bee (for the amount I have in them).

But up to date as the report is, this is a report about 2024 and this is 2025 and the numbers that appear in this blog are as at the end of September 2025.

I hope that L&G will reach out to policyholders who want to feed back (as I do). As the manager of a large part of my retirement’s finances, I’d like to feel that policyholder and IGC members can have conversations.

That really would be state of the art report