Issued on: 9 September 2010
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Sarah Smart, Chair of the Trustee at The Pensions Trust contributes to FT SchemeXpert Website on a monthly basis. Below is Sarah's first article 'Back to school for trustees'. |
Being a professional trustee must seem like a pretty good way of ensuring you have lots of free time over the summer to go on holiday and generally enjoy the nice weather.That’s certainly what I thought when I headed down this path. The calendar can be organised so that the second batch of meetings for the year is generally out of the way by early July at the latest, with work for the next round not starting until the beginning of September.
Unfortunately it doesn’t really work like that in practice. Yes, there are generally no meetings going on over the summer, but there is still plenty of work to be done. In fact, I now find that the summer is the time of the year which needs most careful planning. Whilst there is much to do, it is the time when most people tend to want to go on holiday. This means that any projects or pieces of work that are due to happen at this time will generally take far longer due to people being away. Although it would be nice to think that our advisors will forego any time off in order to get the job done (and some might argue that this would be reasonable given the rates they charge..), we should be prepared for the fact that it will take longer for them to turn work around.
A lack of proper planning can therefore mean you come back from the summer break with so much on your plate that you will begin to wish you never went away. And this year there seems to have been some sort of conspiracy by the powers that be to make it even worse. We have been bombarded with new guidance, consultation papers and green papers to make sure we don’t fall short of reading material while we soak up the rays. (I rather enthusiastically set about the green paper on the first night of my holiday and got to page 12. I have yet to get any further.) We have had the rather abrupt move from RPI to CPI to get our heads round, and the other seemingly insignificant trifles such as PA 2004 s. 251 to think about. And to cap it all, the investment markets still show no sign of giving us an easy ride.
The benefit of being a professional trustee is that you don’t actually have to try and fit all of this extra reading around a proper job as well. The challenge for us, and for all Chairs of trustee boards, is to ensure that the important stuff is made as easy as possible to access for the trustee board as a whole. This is where scheme secretaries, and proactive advisors, prove their worth, and where a thorough business plan for the scheme becomes an invaluable asset. Scheme secretaries and advisors can work together to provide a comprehensive summary of developments over the summer, accompanied by a list of items (such as s. 251 resolutions) that need to be factored into the business plan over the coming months.
With some proper planning, and a good support team in place, the challenges thrown up by the summer break should be easily overcome. Which means that I really should now get back to reading that green paper...