Anne-Marie Winton comments in Pensions Expert – are trustees listening to the experts?
Anne-Marie Winton comments in Pensions Expert on how trustees are beginning to rely on their emotions rather than expert opinions when making monumental decisions.
Anne-Marie said that while she could see how trustees might be lured away from heeding the advice of an expert, “we have a pretty good system in the UK of educating and informing trustees”.
A large volume of good information is publicly available, said Winton. However, a mass of material awaits trustees who look beyond official sources such as the Department for Work and Pensions and industry experts.
Winton said: “I don’t think I really want [tabloid] headlines directing how pension trustees choose to invest.”
Yet non-expert information can still help promote healthy debate on trustee boards, Winton said. “As long as it’s always clear that it’s okay to ask questions – it’s okay to say, ‘I have read something somewhere else, can you explain to me why I shouldn’t be following that particular view?'”
She added that the administrative requirements on trustees test how robust their reasoning is.
She said that a trustee saying, “‘Oh I read it in a free sheet somewhere, or I saw it on TV’, that’s not going to be good enough to stand the test of time because trustees can be held to account for years after their decisions”.
Read the article in Pensions Expert here.
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