Executive Summary

In this, our first annual DE&I survey of Professional Trustee firms, we invited accredited professional pension trustees from 12 (now 10) of the largest professional trustee firms in the UK to complete an anonymised online questionnaire, gathering data from nearly 100 trustees across 8 firms (referred to throughout as “All Firms”).

We used this information to provide an average across the professional pension trustee firms (which individual firms can use to benchmark themselves against). We also compared it against data provided by The Pensions Regulator (TPR) on its own workforce.

…measures aimed at improving D&I on trustee boards can be broken down into those which are aimed at recruiting diverse people, and those aimed at the retention and continuous development of existing trustee board members…

– PLSA, Diversity & Inclusion – Made Simple Guide, 2020

The key observations from our 2022/23 survey were as follows:

THE 9 PROTECTED CHARACTERISTICS:

TPR has a higher proportion (23%) of its workforce not of white origin than All Firms (8%).
TPR has a higher proportion (7%) of new parents in the last 12 months than All Firms (3%).
All Firms have a higher proportion of trustees aged under 30 or over 60 (30%) than TPR’s workforce (16%).

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND:

29% of trustees across All Firms are from an actuarial background.
18% of trustees across All Firms are from a business/finance/covenant background.
Only 7% of trustees across All Firms are from an investment background.

The BWD DE&I Index →

The BWD DE&I Index

To further illustrate comparisons between firms and to identify emerging trends over time, we have used the concept of a ‘Litmus Test’ to introduce a measure of diversity we call The BWD DE&I Index. The BWD DE&I Index uses a firm’s diversity data assessed against the 9 protected characteristics to produce a single score ranging between 0% and 100%, with 50% representing a diverse workforce.

Observations:

TPR’s BWD DE&I Score has fallen slightly from 40% in 2021 to 39% in 2022. This suggests TPR’s workforce is slightly less diverse in 2022 compared to 2021.
The BWD DE&I Score for All Firms in 2022 is 29%, lower than TPR’s score of 39% in 2022. This suggests Professional Pension Trustees across All Firms are less diverse than TPR’s workforce.