UK – The chief executive of the National Association of Pensions Funds has called for the system of government organisations and so-called 'quangos' that regulates pension schemes to be consolidated.

Christine Farnish said today that different pensions arrangements such as personal, stakeholder, defined benefits and hybrid are under the supervision of a number of organisations like the Department for Work and Pensions, The Treasury and the Financial Ombudsman.

“We need to put it all in a bottle and shake it up and make something more coherent, after next elections,” she said at the Pension Liability Management Summit.

Farnish spoke of the changes brought by the Pension Act 2004 - like the launch of a new pension regulator, which will replace the Occupational Pensions Regulatory Authority, Opra.

The new regulator will be called to make an ultimate decision, if trustees and employers fail to reach agreement on policies to meet the requirements of the Statutory Funding Objective, SFO, which replaces the Minimum Funding Requirement, MFR.

The statutory funding objective is to "have sufficient and appropriate assets to cover its technical provisions within a limited period of time” but the meaning of “sufficient”, “appropriate” and “limited period of time” is still obscure, Farnish said.

The new regulator also has the last word if the two parties do not agree on a recovery plan and contributions – leading Farnish to foresees quite a lot of court cases.

She also commented on the Pension Protection Fund, PPF, a new product of the Pension Act 2004.

In setting up the PPF, which will act as safety net for members of under-funded DB schemes whose sponsor is insolvent, the government might not have responded to the risk “with a proportionate” measure, Farnish said.

Farnish said there was only a 0.02% of DB schemes going bust.