Who will run your pension fund after reorganisation?

The government promised guidance on this 16th July, in a single line buried at paragraph 5.7.5 of its staffing rules. It has now arrived just a fortnight later.

The question it answers is simple (with perhaps a slightly awkward answer). In a two-tier area, the county council usually administers the LGPS fund covering staff across the county and every district in it, but if reorganisation abolishes the county council, who runs the fund?

If you’re an LGPS member, the answer is reassuring

Reassuringly, almost nothing changes.

Your membership continues and the pension you’ve built up doesn’t move, pause or change value. The fund “simply” carries on with the same assets and the same liabilities. What changes is which organisation’s name sits above the door, and whoever takes it on has to comply with every LGPS Regulation from day one.

If you’re applying for council jobs in a reorganising area, this changes nothing about what you’d be joining. For how the LGPS actually works, see our guide to public sector pensions. And if it’s your job rather than your pension that’s on your mind, our guide to council jobs during reorganisation covers where TUPE fits in.

If you’re in HR, you have things to do (two things really)

The guidance is explicit that employers must make members aware of their options for their pension after reorganisation, alongside the usual auto-enrolment and contractual enrolment duties. On the surface that’s a communication job with HR’s name on it, and it might have to land during a period when staff might be already receiving a lot of unsettling messages. But getting in early with a message to say “your pension is safe and here’s why” might just be worth more than a technically complete note sent later.

The second is possibly a quieter “thing”. Whoever ends up administering the fund has to satisfy the government on capacity, governance, cyber security and data protection (and over decades of member records). That could mean your pensions and governance colleagues are about to become considerably more in demand, at exactly the point they’re least certain who will employ them. If you have a retention conversation to have this year, that could be a team to look to first!

We’ve been advertising public sector jobs since 1999, and we’ll be keeping an eye out to see if pensions administration starts to become a harder area to recruit into over the next two years.

The dates

Most reorganisation dates people track are 2027 and 2028. These are earlier.

Funds wanting to set up a standalone pension authority, rather than handing the fund to one of the new councils, must propose it by 15th February 2027. Proposals to move the fund to a new unitary are due by 1st March 2027 for a decision before the May 2027 elections, or 30th September 2027 otherwise.

Surrey has already done it

Surrey didn’t wait for the guidance and on 5th June 2026, nearly two months before it was published, the local government minister wrote to the leaders of the East and West Surrey shadow councils and to Surrey County Council, agreeing that the Surrey Pension Fund could become a Single Purpose Pension Authority.

That makes it the first fund in this round of reorganisation to go standalone, rather than handing the fund over to one of the new councils. When Northamptonshire and Cumbria reorganised, a successor council took the role on both times.

Surrey’s argument was largely about conflict of interest. A committee paper back in October 2025 put it fairly plainly: when a council is both an employer paying into the fund and the body that administers it, those two jobs can pull against each other. A single purpose pension authority is exactly what it sounds like: an organisation that does nothing but run the pension fund, sitting outside both new councils and answering only to the fund itself.

The fund is worth somewhere around £6 billion, and unlike almost everything else in Surrey, it isn’t being split in two. The whole fund transfers across in one piece on vesting day, 1st April 2027.

The deadlines above all assume shadow councils elected in May 2027, and the one area running a year ahead had already settled the question before they were published.

The bit that's easy to miss

For pensions, reorganisation could turn into a people problem. Every one of the government's criteria comes down to having people who already know the fund, and it might be a fair assumption to make, that pensions administration isn't a job you can pick up from a few handover notes.

Those are the same people spending the next eighteen months unsure who'll be employing them and while new structures may be relatively straightforward to draw up, who's still in the room to run them could be a harder question to answer.

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Last updated: 30th July 2026