She adds that while the industry and regulators have made efforts to control it, and there are some signs that the controls put in place have had some effect, the bulk of suspicious transfer requests AJ Bell continues to see are schemes that have been established in a way to make them look like genuine SSASs.
“Pre A-Day there was a requirement for a professional trustee to be appointed for a SSAS and I think we are reaching the point where this requirement needs to be re-introduced. Failure to do so means that the pension savings of many individuals remain at risk from the attention of fraudsters, she says.
Robert Graves, head of pensions technical services at Rowanmoor, believes that stringent due diligence on any investments that member trusts wish to make can help provide a robust model and assist the prevention of pension liberation fraud. “Other SSAS business models exist whereby non-pension professional entities may act as the administrator and trustee, which we consider a risk,” he adds.
The survey covers 32 providers and all figures are as at 1 December 2015, unless specified otherwise.
Table 1 looks at the sizes of each provider, by number of schemes and total funds under management. All data is for the year to 1 December for 2015’s figures, and for the whole calendar year in previous years.
The total size of funds under management has fallen slightly on last year’s figures – from £17,315m to £16,894m – but this could just be attributed to the lack of disclosure from some providers, rather than the actual amount falling. Despite this, the total number of SSASs has risen slightly since last year, from 16,362 schemes to 17,751 in 2015.
But, it should be kept in mind that one of the largest providers, James Hay, did not disclose its figure. James Hay is the third largest provider by size after Barnett Waddingham and Rowanmoor, with £2bn in funds under management, so it can be assumed that it would account for a large portion of total number of SSASs.
One notable figure comes from Hornbuckle, which saw its assets drop from £580m to £400m – a loss of 30 per cent. If comparing with last year’s printed survey, it should be noted the group had previously provided incorrect data for 2014.
The Table also takes a closer look at the number of schemes set up. As with previous surveys, there are many non-disclosures when it comes to this section. In order to generate a better idea of how many SSASs were set up in those years, we have sourced some figures from 2015’s survey for years that were not disclosed in this year’s survey responses. These figures have been marked in the Table with an asterisk. Of those disclosed, the figure stood at 752 for 2014, but taking into account figures from last year (although this is to 1 December 2014), the estimated figure is actually 1,213 schemes set up in the year. For 2015 to 1 December, 1,165 schemes were set up, although there were also many providers which did not provide us with a figure.
