Institute of Development Studies, director of finance and operations, Tim Catherall, responds to a guest comment by Overseas Development Institute (ODI) director of professional services, Christopher Williams on smaller organisations' involvement with USS negotiations.

We read Christopher Williams’ comments about how a think tank is affected by the current pensions debates with interest. Like the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) offers the USS pensions scheme.

Unusually for a charity, it is our main pension scheme, with over 90 per cent of our employees currently members and the increasing costs of the scheme deficit weigh heavily on our staff as well as on the institute.

As a global research and teaching organisation for equitable and sustainable change we work with partners all over the world on a range of issues from alleviating extreme poverty, promoting gender justice and freedom of religion to the inclusion of persons with disabilities and tackling climate conflict and the spread of disease.

We receive no core funding and have to maintain a tight control on our costs in order to deliver our life changing research as a global public benefit.

We are absolutely committed to ensuring that all our employees have high quality pensions. We know how valued the benefits of USS are and we fully support the search for sustainable solutions that bring decent benefits at a reasonable cost.

We continue to work closely with our unions to achieve this and support the call for full transparency in the way USS deals with the implications of these negotiations, and the methodologies it uses. However, given our small size and funding model, we do have concerns about affordability for us an institution and for individual staff scheme members.

Smaller organisations have had little voice in the consultations so far, and we want to address this. We would like to invite other small and medium sized independent research organisations to come together to explore our shared challenges and to work with the unions and USS to increase our voice and the voice of all our employees in the debate.

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