John Paino is the current Pensioner appointed Trustee Director and his term of office is due to end in July 2020. As a Pensioner member of the Scheme we would normally be writing to you to seek your nominations for this role.

However, these are not normal times! The Coronavirus pandemic, and subsequent Government ‘Lockdown’ has caused the Trustee to consider carefully if it would be more sensible to extend John’s term of office, deferring the need to seek nominations for a further 12 months. I have therefore asked John if he would be prepared to extend his term of office, which he has agreed to do.

As a result, we will now be seeking nominations around this time in 2021. As part of the Trustee’s discussions we have looked at how our Trustee Directors are appointed. As a recap there are up to 10 Trustee Directors who collectively make up the Trustee Board — four of whom are Member Nominated Trustee Directors (MNTDs) of which three are appointed by the Active members and one by Pensioner members — each serving for a fixed term of office. The remaining six Trustee Directors are appointed by the Company, with at least one being a Pensioner member.

It is very important that our Trustee Directors come from a diverse range of backgrounds, whilst also having a broad range of complementary skills. We have concluded that the best way to achieve this will be to change the process for selecting MNTDs in future. The current process for the Pensioner appointed MNTD falls into two distinct phases:

• The nomination phase — we invite Pensioner members to nominate themselves for the position, with the support of three further Pensioner members.
• The selection phase — this is achieved by a simple ballot of the Pensioner members with them choosing their preferred candidate from all the nominations received.

The nomination phase will remain the same going forward, however the selection phase will no longer be a ballot of the Pensioner members. Instead we will be adopting an approach which uses selection panels, that will include existing Trustee Directors, to choose the appropriate candidate from those nominations received.

This change will also be adopted for the appointment of the three MNTDs that are appointed from the Active membership. We will provide further details about how the selection phase will operate in 2021, at the same time as we write to all Pensioner members seeking nominations.

Marion Steel - Pensions Manager