Integrated risk management plans: a request to pension trustee advisers

Topic:

Legal & governance

Date published:

Tuesday, 2 February 2016

Author:

Wayne Phelan

Admittedly it is still relatively early days for integrated risk management plans (IRMPs) but I have a request… Can we please make them useful and easy for trustees to read?

A lot of work has been done in recent years to make communications for pension members more effective. I think many communications produced for trustees - be they IRMPs or other reports and documents tabled at trustee meetings - would benefit from the same treatment.

I may be over-simplifying it, but I don’t think advisers would go far wrong by thinking through these few questions before preparing a document for pension trustees:

Having to plough through several hundred/thousand words is not the answer. Many of us like diagrams, charts, ‘traffic lights’ and other illustrations just as much as our scheme members do. After all, they are often the most effective way of getting the point across. The ‘techies’ amongst us can always dive into the detail at the back, if narrative and tables of data are consigned to appendices.

So, when you are developing an IRMP or next preparing another pensions report, please remember it is just as important to engage trustees as it is scheme members. We are only humans after all.

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