Pensions Weekly Update – 28 January 2025

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Here is our weekly summary of key legal and regulatory developments relevant to occupational pension schemes that you might have missed, with links for further information.

The Secretary of State has published the annual review of the automatic enrolment earnings trigger and qualifying earnings band for 2025-2026. The earnings trigger will remain at the current level of £10,000, the lower earnings limit will continue to be set at £6,240 and the upper earnings limit will continue to be set at £50,270. This is expected to result in an estimated 15.7 million people participating in private sector pension provision during 2025-2026.
HM Revenue and Custom (HMRC) has published pension schemes newsletter 166. This includes progress on updating tax codes when people first draw a pension payment, meaning that fewer people should need to reclaim overpaid tax at the end of the tax year. The newsletter also includes a reminder that pension scheme returns for the tax year 2024-2025 must be submitted on the new managing pension schemes service, and that schemes must be migrated over onto that new service to submit their pension scheme return. Trustees should take action now if they have not already dealt with the migration process.
The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) has published additional sector guidance to support the assessment, management and disclosure of nature-related issues by companies globally. The new sectors included in TNFD guidance are (1) apparels, textiles and footwear; (2) beverages; (3) construction materials; and (4) engineering, construction and real estate. Consultations on draft guidance for fishing, marine transportation and cruise lines, as well as water and utilities services have also been published. Consultations close on 4 April 2025.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has published a statement setting out how pension providers should register their connection with the pensions dashboard ecosystem provided by the Money and Pensions Service.
The government has published a press release confirming that the chancellor is set to relax the rules around extracting surplus from defined benefit pension schemes. At the time of writing, the detail is not yet available.
Companies House has released some further dates in its timeline to improve corporate transparency. Identity checking directors and people with significant control is one of the measures that will be implemented by Companies House. Identity verification will be carried out when a company makes its first confirmation statement after “summer 2025”. However, it will be possible to undergo voluntary identity verification in advance of a company’s confirmation statement. This might be an attractive option for some directors of a corporate trustee, given that once the window for submitting a confirmation statement opens, they will only have a 14-day window in which to complete the identity verification process. It will be possible for directors to voluntarily undergo identity verification from 25 March 2025. Another new date in the timeline is that “by summer 2025” directors will be able to request the removal of their date of birth from documents filed at Companies House before 10 March 2015. Any person who was a director of any company before that date will still have their date of birth freely accessible, even if they have since ceased to act as a director of that company.
In December 2024, the FCA published a consultation paper on the arrangements for implementing the private intermittent securities and capital exchange system (PISCES), the “private stock market” regime, later this year. Institutional investors, including pension funds, may all be interested in the gap it is seeking to fill. Setting aside its differences with traditional private M&A structures, PISCES will, at a minimum, offer buy-side investors new opportunities for assessing private companies and this may likely be one of its initial draws once implemented. For further information, please get in touch with your usual firm contact.
Using the same name as, or one similar to, a company that is in insolvent liquidation is prohibited by the Insolvency Act 1986. Rachael Markham explores the exceptions in this blog.
On 6 November 2024, the UK Government released guidance on the steps companies should take to implement reasonable procedures to prevent fraud and avail themselves of a defence to the failure to prevent fraud offence (FTPFO). The clock is now ticking for businesses to conduct risk assessments and have an appropriate compliance framework in place before the FTPFO comes into force on 1 September 2025. Hannah Laming and Malak Abbas provide some high-level pointers on the steps organisations should take to prepare.