Sarah Mulally looks more to me like the Church of England’s first CEO ,, not just its first female archbishop.

The CoE has all the making of a failing business, dare I compare it to the Royal Mail?  It’s big into pensions for its core staff like the Royal Mail:: but it also has 700 employers in its administrative umbrella – where it’s so at the multi-employer (UMES) version of CDC. It has a different structure but will offer similar member outcomes – deferred pay.

Oh but it has a DB and a DC scheme as well as cash balance “DC” scheme! Even more complex than Royal Mail.

The CDC scheme could be a permanent solution for employees who have the job security of posties, the CoE has been a pension administrator for 100 years and is proud of it.

In the clergy pension scheme – known as the Church of England Funded Pension Scheme (CEFPS) – there’s provision for a typical ‘defined benefit’ pension but whether this is the CAPF defined benefit plan, I couldn’t work out.

I know that this has been a long time in the making!

I apologise for making the comparison, but the complexity of pension arrangements between CoE and Royal Mail is also apparent! Try this summary…

I think that f you are clergy and CoE hardcore , you get the CAPF.

The main option if you are an employer associated with the Church of England (there are 700 of them in CWPF) is that you are entering into a cash balance plan. I may have got this wrong, but CWPF is particularly confusing.

How you can guarantee cash with a defined contribution defeats me. If you are an employer and you walk away from a cash balance plan, for whatever reason, then you are on the hook for a shortfall. I suspect that section 75 lurks in the background – which is not a defined contribution from employers , but a potential liability. This is not a CDC plan, it needs a miracle to work at all time for all employers.

But I’m sure that there is a lot that the Church of England can do in the realm of miracle. There are a lot of other pension schemes under the management of the Church of England and you can roam through them on this link.

Having been 100 years providing pensions, I hope that 2026 will see a CoE CDC pension plan that makes sense of all this.

The CoE has made is so plain that they want to do CDC that the DWP has quoted them as early as 2024 as being (along with TPT) a candidate.

This is from October 2024 from Pension Extra

The Church of England Pension Board and TPT Retirement Solutions were quoted in the DWP’s press release, confirming their interest in the new model.

John Ball, chief executive of the Church of England Pensions Board, said: “We welcome the publication today of draft regulations that support the creation of multi-employer CDC pension schemes.

“We look forward to scrutinising the detail, and to seeing how in due course, such an arrangement might transform retirement plans for those who work for the Church.”

I have had plenty of chances to listen to the new archbishop and I have been left with the impression of a Christian City CEO.

She now has to sort out the ongoing problems in the Church of England of falling congregations and scandals with employees. It has a chance to put its finances in order by moving away from a defined contribution cash balance plan (?) to a CDC plan that makes sense and if it was working on this in 2024 it must already have knocked up a big consultancy bill. I don’t know if the defined benefit and contribution plans

My guess is that Sarah Mullaly will be less a spiritual leader and more the chief executive officer of her Church. This will not be out of her routine