Royal London has begun making a number of reforms to workplace pensions, which are set to include changes such as the removal of some exit fees.

Exit charges will be removed when a customer transfers their pension away from Royal London in certain legacy contracts and policy fees will be removed on certain legacy workplace pensions that are no longer receiving contributions.

The changes come as part of a report from Royal London’s Independent Governance Committee – one of the first IGC reports to have been made public.

Other reforms to be introduced are the increase in the overall level of ‘fairness’ in some of the more complex charging structures and an improvement in how the loyalty bonus structure works on some legacy products.

Royal London said the changes are expected to benefit over 27,000 workplace pension members.

“The committee does not see this first review as a one-off exercise and we expect continually to challenge Royal London to evaluate and improve its workplace pensions,” the firm’s IGC chair Phil Green said.

He added that the proposals mainly impact legacy scheme members who should benefit from improved terms to their pension policies in the near future.

“Royal London has agreed to act quickly to implement our recommendations and it is estimated that the cost of the changes proposed and agreed will be over £15m. This represents a reduction of the charges on the affected workplace pensions of over 20 per cent,” he said.

Also commenting on the IGC report, Royal London’s director of policy Steve Webb said Royal London intends to take action where it has been identified so that “the terms of these minority policies, set up some years ago, are updated as soon as possible”.

The Royal London IGC was formed in April 2015, with the majority of members independent of Royal London, to oversee the governance of the workplace pension schemes administered by Royal London.

All providers of workplace pensions that do not have a board of trustees are required to have an Independent Governance Committee distinct from the provider.

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