On 26 May Burges Salmon hosted The Pensions Regulator (TPR) for ‘The rise of The Pensions Regulator’ webinar to discuss how the new regulatory and enforcement powers work in practice and how they affect pension trustees and scheme sponsors.

The session was delivered by Clive Pugh, Partner, Richard Pettit, Partner, Chris Brown, Director, and Emmijo Barwe, Solicitor. We were very grateful to be joined by Erica Carroll, Director of Enforcement at The Pensions Regulator, and James Pickering, lawyer at The Pensions Regulator.

The talk covered key ground and we hope is useful listening for trustees and employers considering the impact of corporate activity on their pension scheme.

You can listen to the webinar on demand (we are about to send the link out to our contacts).

We covered:

• a reminder of the consultations and policies recently issued in this space;
• TPR’s recent experience of relevant cases and of the clearance regime;
• whether more anti-avoidance cases are expected and the role of the reasonableness test;
• factors relevant to TPR’s choice between exercising its criminal powers rather than its civil ones;
• the new notifiable events regime; and
• how TPR expects to use its information gathering powers.

We also demonstrated Burges Salmon’s interactive triage tool which was launched to help employers and pensions trustees navigate the new powers introduced by the Pension Schemes Act 2021. The tool is free to access online and will be updated for the changes to the notifiable events regime once confirmed by the DWP, hopefully later this year. If you would like access to the free triage tool, please see our website here.

If you would like to know more about TPR’s powers or any of the concepts referred to above, please contact any of Clive, Richard, Chris or Emmijo or your usual Burges Salmon pensions contact.