Trustee standards – an impractical election fever

Some of the suggestions LeGrand made were good. He suggests trustee chairs should be professional trustees – which as a professional trustee I would wholeheartedly support.

You need to know what trusteeship entails before you can judge if someone might be the right person for the role  

But he goes on to say they “should be selected by the sponsor from a pool elected by the membership”, which might not be very practical. 

There is a generalised principle that pension scheme members are better served by trustees that they have chosen. However, this is highly subjective. There may be a sliver of truth in this for some schemes, but what serves members best is the highest possible standard of trusteeship.

It also is not a case of representing members, as all trustees have the same absolute legal duties regardless of how they are chosen and whether they are a member, independent, company appointed or a company official. 

How would members elect professional trustees?

Now the selection process: how does a wider pool or longlist of potential professional chairs get created for the member to select from? Some national list of professional trustees, or suggestions given to them? 

Then how do the members choose from the longlist? There is a danger this becomes a beauty parade based on CVs. This has an inherent danger of the list being based on vacuous criteria and length of historic qualifications or appointments rather than the quality of the individual. Finding the time to interview a longer list would be hard to find. 

Are the members of most schemes well placed to select from a longlist to a shortlist of professional trustees? This is not meant to criticise members, but in truth you need to know what trusteeship entails before you can judge if someone might be the right person for the role.  

I’m not sure I would be good at selecting a director for Widget plc, and it is not clear why a member of Widget plc’s scheme is ideally placed to select their professional trustee shortlist. Would they select those that just ‘seemed right’, knowing the employer makes the final choice? 

Let’s cherrypick the proposals, perhaps leaving this one out.

Colin Richardson is a director at professional trustee company PTL