PENSIONS & BENEFITS

We are the National Housing Federation’s preferred supplier for pensions advice. We believe we have exactly the expertise and experience in advising housing associations that you need to achieve positive outcomes and allocate resources most efficiently.

Ultimately our aim is to help housing associations run their pension arrangements better, so they can focus their time and funds on their key objective of providing affordable housing.

Our dedicated Social Housing team specialise in advising housing associations. We have advised associations representing around 25% of the English housing market, with organisations ranging in size from under 5,000 units to over 200,000 units, and including more than half of the G15 group of the largest London associations.

We advise housing associations on all aspects of pensions and benefits. This includes actuarial, investment, employer covenant, specialist defined contribution advice and financial wellbeing advice. Our range of expertise and broad client base means we have strong insight into the housing sector and are well placed to support housing associations across all areas of the increasingly complex and fast-changing pension environment.

But at LCP we are not solely about dealing with pension issues client by client. We believe the best way to address the pension issues faced by the sector is by proactively engaging with policymakers and regulators and working with the NHF to shape policy to deliver the best outcomes for the sector.

Thank you for making complex and strategic pension matters so easy for us to follow

How we can help

Whether you have employees in the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS), Social Housing Pension Scheme (SHPS), any of TPT's other schemes (such as the Growth Plan or SHAPS), your own defined benefit pension scheme, a defined contribution scheme, or any combination of these, we have the sector expertise and experience to help you manage pensions risks, take opportunities and get better value for money.

We think that the three key issues that the sector faces currently are:

Managing legacy DB schemes, and realising value from them where possible 

Whilst some associations will still be using DB schemes for new hires, for most associations DB schemes such as SHPS and the LGPS are legacy issues that need to be managed. These legacy schemes can take up an increasingly disproportionate amount of resource, and recent regulatory changes are adding to this – although there are now increasing opportunities for associations to deal with and benefit from such schemes, which we can help with.

Improving outcomes from DC schemes 

There has been a trend away from defined benefit to defined contribution schemes for many housing associations. Many housing associations are concerned that their employees’ defined contribution pensions should offer better value and may not provide employees with sufficient funds for retirement. Our DC specialists have worked with many housing associations to improve their DC offerings to their employees, focusing on investments choices and default investment strategies that better reflect how members will be using their funds, whilst also looking at member charges, and opportunities to improve engagement.

Providing attractive benefits to ensure staff retention and enable housing associations to deliver social impact

In our experience, for many associations the drive to deliver on social impact extends to wanting to ensure employees are looked after in old age as well as whilst they’re working.  In addition, providing attractive benefits to staff enables housing associations to retain the best talent to achieve the best outcomes for residents.

We have worked with a number of housing associations to create well-designed pension offerings, including consideration of Living Pensions standards. We are also working with clients on the idea of Collective Defined Contribution (CDC) schemes – which is a new option expected to provide pensions more efficiently than defined contribution, without the risk to employers of defined benefit. We believe this could work really well in the sector.

LCP have supported us through each stage of our thinking on CDC, from considering scheme design options to liability and investment modelling. Stakeholder management is key to us, and LCP helped us engage proactively in the development of regulations to achieve our simplification goals.