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What happens to the money you pay into your Railways Pension Scheme once it leaves your wages?   

How it works - our Trustee

The funds from your RPS contributions are carefully managed by a group of specialist employer and elected member representatives, known as the “Trustee”. The Trustee’s job – along with the help of our team of pensions and investment specialists, is to regularly check that the Scheme administration and financial investments are doing well and to keep you informed.

Our financial specialists

The Trustee works closely with our team of pensions and investment experts. Together, their responsibility is to pay your pension securely, affordably and sustainably. With their combined professional knowledge and financial market insight, this team makes careful and informed decisions on where to invest your money, so that your pension pot grows and you receive the benefits you were promised. These investment and financial specialists are known as the Scheme’s “investment manager” or RPMI Railpen.

Others involved in decision-making 

RPMI Railpen and the Trustee also work with Pension Committees, set up by our Scheme employers. The Pension Committees provide additional oversight and help the investment specialists and Trustees to understand the member perspective.

The Railpen Investment Board oversees the management of funds by RPMI Railpen.

How and why we invest

Your pension contributions are combined into “pooled” or collective investment funds. This means your money immediately benefits from economies of scale and the team can choose from a wider, more valuable range of investments.

Our investment team uses these funds to meet the specific needs of over 100 individual Sections within the Railways Pensions Scheme.

Rather than being held in cash savings, where inflation could reduce its value, investing gives your pension a better chance to grow, whilst also helping the organisations your funds are supporting. The idea is that as these organisations grow, so too does the value of your pension.

Every Section has its own specific requirements, so we work with each Section and its representatives, to create the most suitable investment strategy for them.

To guide all our decisions, we follow firm investment beliefs and principles on valuation, risk, diversification and costs, as well as environmental, social and governance factors.

We research our potential investments very carefully as we believe that sustainable, ethical organisations have sustainable futures. These are the organisations that will survive and grow and we want your pension to grow with them.  Investing in this way can also make a difference on behalf of us all, to the future of the world.

Our investments are reviewed regularly to make sure they are still achieving goals on your behalf.

We have been paying your pensions securely, affordably and sustainably for over 50 years.  To achieve this, we continue to invest the scheme’s assets to generate strong investment returns over the long term.  You are in excellent hands.

If you would like to see some examples of where your pension is invested, then visit our blog: From payslip to pension here