Brightwell has welcomed its largest-ever intake to the Brightwell Pensions Academy, with 27 new trainees joining.

The recruits will begin a structured nine-to-12-month training programme at Brightwell's Chesterfield administration hub, combining classroom-based learning, technical pensions training and practical workplace experience. On completion of the programme, participants will graduate as qualified pensions administrators. The academy launched in 2022 with the aim of addressing a growing skills shortage across the pensions industry by providing an alternative route into the profession for people with little or no prior experience.

Delancey has expanded its mandate with a UK defined benefit (DB) pension scheme, securing up to £400m of additional investment capacity for UK real estate.

The additional capital brings the mandate to just under £1bn, following three years of outperformance against the MSCI Quarterly Property Index. The discretionary capital is available for immediate deployment and will target value-add, sector-agnostic opportunities, complementing the existing portfolio. The further investment follows Delancey’s repositioning and right-sizing of the portfolio since taking over management in December 2022, using its Proactive Core approach focused on active asset management, conviction investing, sell discipline, bespoke structuring and environmental, social and governance (ESG).

PensionBee has urged savers to get their pension information organised now, rather than waiting for dashboards to reveal the true scale of pension fragmentation and trigger an inevitable surge in demand for consolidation.

This warning comes as the pensions dashboards connection deadline approaches, which will see pension schemes and providers within the legal scope connected to the Pensions Dashboards Programme ecosystem. The milestone on 31 October brings the UK a step closer to dashboards becoming available to the public, but PensionBee argued savers do need to wait for dashboards to start tracking down lost pensions. Instead, PensionBee urged savers to take the initiative to do it now, as the government’s free Pension Tracing Service is already available to help people locate old pension providers and begin piecing together their retirement savings.

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