20 years of protecting people's futures

In January 2025, we announced that we'll reduce the levy by more than half to £45 million for 2025/26. This will be our lowest ever levy and almost all schemes (99.7 per cent) are expected to see a reduction in the levy.

Our levy rules for 2025/26 include a provision that enables our Board to calculate a zero conventional levy, if appropriate legislative changes that would give us greater flexibility in setting the levy are sufficiently progressed over the course of 2025/26.
 

We were pleased that the government's Pensions Schemes Bill, presented to Parliament in June 2025, contained provisions intended to give us greater flexibility to reduce the conventional PPF levy. We'll work constructively to support policy makers and stakeholders as these measures are considered further.

Providing outstanding customer service for our members remains our priority. This year we maintained our 98 per cent PPF and FAS member satisfaction level for another year running. We continued to improve the efficiency of our Member Services operation in 2024/25, enabling 90.5 per cent of member services transactions and 67.6 per cent of retirements to be completed on our member website.
 

We participate in CEM Benchmarking's industry leading report where we’re compared to a peer group of 10 similar-sized DB schemes. When we received our report for 2023/24 in September 2024, we were pleased that our service score had increased by two points over the year to 79 out of 100, against a peer average of 68 out of 100. The ease of dealing with us on the phone, accuracy of payments, speed and clarity of written responses, and website functionalities are what set us apart. Our first-contact resolution rate via telephone for 2023/24 was 83 per cent, which is considered to be world-class by the Service Quality Measurement Group.

We were delighted that several of our Scheme and Member Services colleagues received industry recognition for their work in the year, making it through to the shortlists for various categories at the Professional Pensions Rising Star and Women in Pensions Awards 2024.

Providing reassurance to our members is paramount. We recognise that one way we can do this is through ensuring our beneficiary nomination and bereavement process is straightforward and seamless. We redesigned the process with the aim to reduce the burden on members' beneficiaries after their loved one's death.

New tools were added to our member website in August 2024. Members can now nominate their beneficiary and upload supporting evidence on our member website. We then ask members annually to validate that their nomination remains correct. This will ensure beneficiaries start receiving payments much more quickly than previously. We have also added online beneficiary forecasts, a simplified online claim process for beneficiaries and secure messaging, which removes the need to send us personal documents in the post or via email.

We regularly hear concerns from individual members and member groups regarding the lack of provision for indexation on compensation for pre-97 service. We've previously shared, and we continue to share, these concerns with government, and both our Chief Executive and our Chair have discussed this important subject with the Minister for Pensions.

Any changes to compensation levels for our members would require changes to the legislation that was set in 2004. In March 2024, the Work and Pensions Committee recommended that new legislation should be drafted to provide indexation on compensation for pre-97 benefits. In the government’s response to the report, published in April 2025, the Minister for Pensions said the government would consider our compensation framework, particularly pre-97 indexation.

We welcome the active engagement with colleagues in government and will continue to work constructively with them to progress these issues with urgency, reflecting feedback from our members.

We value difference and individuality amongst our people, and we strongly believe that fostering diversity and being inclusive is the right thing to do. In addition to making the PPF a better place to work for our employees, being more inclusive also makes us better at delivering great service to our members. We have 10 employee-led network groups that provide a safe space for employees to share their perspectives.

Ethnic minority representation at senior manager level increased over the year from 17 per cent in March 2024 to 21 per cent in March 2025. Overall ethnic minority representation fell slightly over the year, however, from 32 per cent in March 2024 to 28 per cent in March 2025.

Recognising that people from different ethnic minority groups have distinct experiences, we set a specific target for black representation at the PPF. We reached our target of nine per cent representation of black employees across the organisation in 2023 and that figure has remained stable up to the end of March 2025. Black representation at senior manager level increased over the year, from one per cent in March 2024 to three per cent in March 2025.

This year, we continued to support the 10,000 Interns Foundation, which champions underrepresented talent. In July, we welcomed three interns across our Technology and Change Services and Strategy and Legal Affairs directorates.

Female representation in senior manager roles has improved over the year, from 45 per cent in March 2024 to 53 per cent in March 2025. We’re developing our future female leaders through mentoring, coaching and internal development programmes. We ensure that we are an employer of choice for women by supporting flexible working wherever feasible. We are also focused on creating a menopause-friendly organisation.

Our D&I Sponsorship Group developed our Diversity, Equity & Inclusion strategy for 2025-28 during the year, which we published in June 2025. This strategy identified two new focus areas, social mobility and LGBTQ+, to add to our existing focus areas of gender, ethnicity and disability.

We use investor stewardship as a tool to enhance long-term value. In February, we retained our status as a signatory to the Financial Reporting Council's UK Stewardship Code for a fourth consecutive year. Our Responsible Investment report 2023/24 covers our stewardship activities during the reporting period 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024.

With a large portion of our investments managed externally, we primarily focus our direct engagement efforts on the oversight of our managers’ practices and progress. During the year, we utilised quarterly performance meetings and associated reporting, annual reviews, the diversity and inclusion annual questionnaire and a transition pulse survey as our primary tools for oversight. We also continued to encourage our Private Market managers to adopt the eFront® (part of BlackRock) ESG Data Service project. All Private Market managers responded to our annual ESG reporting survey this year.

We're taking steps as an organisation to achieve net zero for our own operations by 2035 or sooner. Scope 3 financed emissions from our investments are considered separately. We reported on the reductions achieved to our organisation’s environmental footprint in our Climate Change Report 2024, comparing the year-end data for emissions, waste and water consumption from 2023/24 against our baseline year of 2019/20. As the PPF considers climate change to be an emerging risk, and not a principal risk, we continue to focus our metrics and targets reporting on disclosure of our emissions.

We have provided data based on the information available. In some situations, we’ve estimated our usage or spend based on a proxy, such as the proportion of floor space we occupy in our two shared-lease office buildings. Over the year 2024/25, we worked with the facilities managers of the two buildings we occupy to ensure that water, waste, and electricity data is available on a timely basis to support our reporting.

Energy consumption in our offices has increased since 2023/24 due to more floor space being used by other tenants in our office buildings. We have, however, achieved a 31 per cent reduction in our energy consumption since our baseline year. Our location-based emissions have also reduced by 44 per cent compared to our baseline. We continued to source electricity via 100 per cent renewable electricity tariffs for both our offices, meaning our operational Scope 1 and Scope 2 market-based Greenhouse Gas emissions are effectively zero. We added food waste bins in both buildings, and our food waste is sent to an anaerobic digestion plant to create green energy.

We have been reducing the paper we use in our corporate publications and communications for several years, and all of our corporate publications are now digital-only. As the retirement process and many transactions can be completed on our member website, we have reduced the amount of paperwork we send to members. We continue to encourage members to register online and give us their email address so we can send them a digital version of the annual PPF member newsletter instead of a paper copy. We sent over half of member newsletters digitally in 2024/25. We don’t currently have accurate data for all our Scope 3 paper use, such as letters sent on our behalf.

Business travel is an essential element of our business, particularly when carrying out due diligence of our investments and key suppliers. The number of international business flights taken in the year is higher than last year and our 2019/20 pre-pandemic baseline because our in-house portfolio managers were instructed to carry out more face-to-face meetings with fund managers. Employees strive to visit multiple locations within the same international trip to make these visits as efficient as possible. During the year, we investigated how the implementation of a new travel booking platform could provide our people with better visibility of alternative, lower-carbon methods of travel to support effective decision-making when booking travel. Data collection from this would allow more granular reporting on travel emissions. We intend to begin using a travel booking platform during the year 2025/26.

Maintaining confidence in our security profile is central to our strategic, operational and governance processes. Managing risk on a day-to-day basis forms a key part of our strategic and operational planning process.

During the year 2024/25 we engaged an external supplier to complete a full assessment of our cyber security risk governance and management practices against the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. We’ll use the outcomes of the review to identify the areas we need to move forwards with to strengthen our security capability within the organisation.
 

We also received two independently verified certifications:

• Cyber Essentials Plus, a UK Government Standard that provides an independent technical audit of an organisation's IT systems. It demonstrates that an organisation has implemented key cyber controls.
• The ISO 27001 information security risk management framework.