What’s changed in 50 years?
This year LawDeb celebrates 50 years of providing independent professional pension trusteeship to UK pension schemes. Both at LawDeb and across the wider pensions industry there have been major developments in this time, and a fair few things that haven’t changed at all.
For example, in LawDeb’s first ever marketing plan – written in 1987 – we state our key strengths as our independence, our people, our model and our industry connections – and we still consider that the case. Similarly, for our early pension scheme appointments the objective was to protect member benefits throughout the changes facing the sponsor, and this is much the same today.
What has changed is the rise in prominence of pension schemes across all sectors. Regulation, governance requirements and the size of the assets being managed have all increased as have the variety of ways in which pension schemes can now operate, for example the creation of defined contribution schemes and scheme consolidation.
At LawDeb we recognised the need for good pension scheme governance as early as 1969 when we were appointed to the Demerara Sugar Company as sole trustee, a model that has become popular again in recent years. The company had just been bought and the vendor approached LawDeb – at the time known for providing bond trusteeship - to see if we could safeguard the interests of the members of the scheme by acting as trustee. We, of course, accepted. Jump forward to 2019 and we are regularly appointed to schemes facing exactly the same challenges.
Over the last 50 years we at LawDeb have learnt a huge amount about the world of pensions and, thanks to our expert team and large, diverse client base we are considered a leader in the industry.
Why not review our timeline which demonstrates how we became the largest, longest established provider of independent professional trusteeship thanks to small team who felt passionately about pensions, and some companies facing aggressive takeovers.
