Both you and the Partnership contributes to your pension pot. Please see below for more information.
You’ll pay a percentage of your salary before it’s taxed and the Partnership pays this into your DC Pension pot on your behalf.
Although this means your take home pay will be lower, you’ll pay less Income Tax and National Insurance – this is called SMART (Save Money And Reduce Tax), also known as salary sacrifice or salary exchange. You can find out more information on what a SMART pension is on Oneplace.
The Partnership also contributes to your pot and the contributions are invested together and the intention is that your contributions will grow over time.
Once you’ve left the Partnership, both you and the Partnership will stop contributing into your pension pot, but the money will stay invested in a pension pot for you until you retire.
In the first three years of service at the Partnership, your contributions could be:
Once you’ve worked at the Partnership for three years, the Partnership will also put in an additional 4% to your pot each month. So, if you pay in 8% of your ranking pay, the Partnership will add 12% of your ranking pay too – It’s basically free money!
You can choose to pay more to give your pension pot a boost.
The Partnership will match your contributions up to a maximum of 8% of your ranking pay. You can pay regular or one off extra contributions to boost your savings.
You can find out more information about the contribution you could make each month under ‘Managing your contributions’ on Oneplace.
Your contributions are invested in funds chosen by the Trustee. They’ve thought about who’s in the Scheme, and the potential for your money to grow over the long-term until you’re ready to take your benefits.
Understanding your pension savings and knowing how your pot is invested can be tricky.
Put simply, the more you pay in, and the longer it stays invested, the more chance your pension pot has to grow – so you could have more when the time comes to take it.
Details about how to find out are on the ‘Managing your contributions’ page on One Place.
You can find instructions about how to change, or make one-off contributions under, ‘Managing your contributions’ on Oneplace.
To get a better idea of how much you will be paying into your pension pot in terms of real money, take a look at L&G’s salary sacrifice calculator.
You can opt out at any time, but you might want to take some financial advice before you do. The Partnership legally must check whether you’re eligible to join the Scheme every three years, and if you are, it will put you back into the Scheme and let you know when this has been done.
If you’d like to opt out of paying contributions, you’ll need to update Workday. Oneplace tells you how to do this on the ‘Opting out of pensions or Smart contributions’ page.
You’re likely to be a member of the DB Section of the Scheme if you worked at the Partnership before 1 April 2015. XPS is the administrator of the DB Section.
The DB Section closed on 1 April 2020 and therefore members who joined the Partnership after 1 April 2015 will only have a Defined Contribution pension pot.
This is where you can find information about your current pension if you’re a Partner now, or were a Partner after 1 April 2015. The Defined Contribution pages are probably the most important for you.
Members who joined the Partnership before 1 April 2015 may also hold DC pension pots with Prudential or Legal and General, as well as a Defined Benefit Pension in the Scheme. We previously referred to this as Hybrid or Dual Benefit. This is because you may have joined the DC Section of the Scheme when you started working at the Partnership and then, after a defined waiting period (which depends on the date you joined the Partnership), you would have become eligible to join the DB Section.
The DB Section closed on 1 April 2020 and therefore members who joined after 1 April 2015 will only have a DC Section pension pot.
