The Scheme gives you a final salary pension when you retire and provides death benefits for your dependants.
Contributions to the Scheme can be made under SMART Pensions. Paying your contributions in this way means that you could pay lower National Insurance Contributions.
You can choose to pay Additional Voluntary Contributions (AVCs) in order to increase your retirement benefits which are a type of Defined Contribution (DC) benefit. DC benefits invested with Standard Life (not including a small number of With-Profit holdings which will remain with Standard Life) have now moved to a new ‘Master Trust’ pension arrangement with the Mercer Master Trust (‘MMT’). For active Scheme members, this brings a change to the way in which members can elect to pay, change or stop the amounts of AVCs they make. AVCs will now be paid into the Master Trust arrangement and details of the AVC process can be found on the Defined Benefit page.
If you are one of the small number of members who have Standard Life With Profit AVCs you can continue to access the Standard Life website for details of your current fund value and use the pension modelling tools online by accessing Standard Life’s Online Services.
You should ensure you have completed a Nomination of Beneficiaries Form. This helps the Trustee decide who should receive any lump sum payable in the event of your death. The form is available below or you can take the opportunity once you have accessed OneView to update your Nomination of Beneficiaries form online. Please be aware that if you have benefits in the MMT, you must complete a separate Nomination of Beneficiaries form for this pension arrangement.
A Statement of Investment Principles (SIP) is a written statement which sets out the investment policy for a pension scheme and an Implementation Statement (IS) sets out how the trustees have complied with the scheme's Stewardship and Engagement Policy. The latest SIP and IS for the Scheme can be found on this page and also on the Disclosure of information page of this website.