On the go: Industrial company Melrose is to further its commitment to cutting the GKN pension deficit by pledging an additional £100m of money raised from the sale of one of its subsidiaries.

A new cloud-based service promising independent data backup facilities for pension schemes has won praise from industry experts, who hailed it as an “innovative solution” to the rare but worrisome prospect of administrator failure.

This week – three schemes peeved at the government’s RPI decision, Aon criticises the USS trustee, three charged over multimillion-pound fraud, and the defined benefit scheme surplus soars in March.

Podcast: Ray Martin, director at HS Sole Trustees, and Kim Gubler, chair of the Pensions Administration and Standards Association, discuss TPR’s new climate change agenda, the NAO’s warning about the burdensome McCloud judgment, and a bizarre proposal for a national pension fund.

Aon has criticised the methodology and assumptions underlying the Universities Superannuation Scheme trustee’s response to the USS valuation, accusing it of being overly prudent and failing to properly justify several of its assumptions.

The introduction of a bridging pension option in the Rolls-Royce UK Pension Fund has helped smooth the transition for its members following a scheme restructure announced in May last year.