Campaigning for changes to the UK pension law
There have been important developments to ShareAction’s fiduciary duty campaign over the past few months. While it has been a long-standing campaign of the organisation, the past year has seen huge milestones.
With auto-enrolment, many of us will be paying into a pension to ensure we have some level of financial comfort when we retire. It's important that the companies who hold and invest our pension contributions do so wisely and consider the impacts of those investments.
ShareAction has campaigned for many years for the clarification of the rules pension scheme trustees need to follow when managing the money invested through our pensions, known as fiduciary duty (you can read more below on what fiduciary duty means). We believe in this so strongly that we drafted an amendment to the Pension Schemes Bill earlier this year in the hope of changing the law.
Important progress: amendment to the Pension Schemes Bill
The Pension Schemes Bill was introduced in the House of Commons on 5th June 2025, with the Government promising a historic overhaul of the pensions system to boost pension savings and drive growth in the UK economy. In October, Liam Byrne MP tabled our amendment on fiduciary duty clarification to the Bill, which was a huge win. Then we, along with hundreds of our supporters, contacted MPs to gain support for our amendment. This resulted in 34 cross-party MP signatories and became the second-most popular amendment to the Bill.
The amendment gained significant support from MPs so the Minister for Pensions, Torsten Bell MP, announced that the Government will introduce statutory guidance for fiduciary duty to allow pension scheme trustees to consider wider factors such as climate or standards of living when making their investment decisions.
This was a very promising reaction to our challenge of the current pensions system. However, statutory guidance is not the law. Pension funds would have to consider this guidance but not necessarily follow it. It would not apply to all pension schemes, and could be more easily overturned by a future government. It would not provide pension scheme trustees with sufficient legal standing, or the confidence, to invest with a longer-term attitude to savers’ best interests. Including the amendment in primary legislation through the Pensions Schemes Bill would ensure that pension fund investment practices should take account of huge risks like climate change and can also consider the views of members and the indirect impact of investments on their standard of living.
What’s next?
The Pension Schemes Bill was introduced in the House of Lords in on 5th December 2025. We will be using similar tactics to gain support from Peers in the House of Lords while the Pension Schemes Bill goes through the different stages, to ensure our amendment is tabled and discussed. It must gain sufficient support from Peers, like MPs in the House of Commons, to ensure it will be included in the final version of the Bill. Now that the amendment has received a lot of attention during debates and notably, addressed by the Minister for Pensions, we hope that momentum will continue to build.
So, what is fiduciary duty and why are we still pushing?
Fiduciary duty is the legal responsibility that pension fund managers have when they’re in charge of someone else’s money. It means they must always act in the best interests of the people whose money they manage, not in their own interest. This means trying to ensure they have a healthy pension pot to draw on in retirement. But it should also mean investing in a way that takes account of system level risks such as climate change, and the indirect effects that those investments can have on people’s standard of living – for example, investments in the regeneration of the saver's local economy would benefit them more than investing in a large multinational company.
The law today is unclear: many pension scheme trustees and managers feel unable to consider these risks in their investment strategy or invest in the very things that could secure the long-term interests of their members, for example economic growth, development of new sectors, the environment, and the living standards on which we will rely. The fiduciary duty amendment proposed by ShareAction is an opportunity to act in the best interests of members while facing the issues of our modern world.
The Government wants to drive growth into the UK economy and has introduced instruments like the Mansion House Accord, which invited pension schemes to become voluntary signatories and invest up to 5% of their portfolios in the UK economy by 2030. A clarification of fiduciary duty would not just enable the largest schemes with significant resources to invest in the UK, but all schemes would have the legal backing to invest in UK-based initiatives. This would benefit savers themselves, local economies and better reflect UK pension savers’ views.
We are still pushing for the fiduciary duty clarification to be enshrined in law because it is important for the pensions system to reflect the needs of its savers and to protect the environment into which we retire.
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