What does a scheme secretary do?

Ask a trustee board how it functions and the answers will mention advisers, committees, and the chair. Ask how it actually runs (how the meeting happens on the right date, with the right papers, producing minutes that hold up years later) and the answer is almost always one person: the scheme secretary. It is the least visible role in pension governance and the one the whole system depends on. This guide explains what the job involves, whether it is required, what a year in the role looks like, and how the tooling around it is changing.

What does a scheme secretary do?

The scheme secretary runs the governance of a pension scheme's trustee board. They are not a trustee and they do not make the board's decisions. They make the board's decision-making possible: organising its meetings, managing its calendar, coordinating its advisers, and maintaining the record that proves the board did its job. If the trustees are the brain of the scheme, the secretary is the nervous system.

In practice, the role breaks down into a consistent set of duties:

• The meeting cycle. Planning agendas with the chair, commissioning papers from advisers and the administrator, compiling and distributing the meeting pack, drafting minutes, and logging the actions and decisions that come out of each meeting
• The governance calendar. Maintaining the board's forward plan so that every recurring obligation (adviser reviews, policy reviews, training, valuations) lands in the right meeting of the right year, rather than being remembered late or not at all
• Liaison. Acting as the connective tissue between trustees, the sponsoring employer, the administrator, and the advisers (actuary, legal, investment, covenant). Most scheme correspondence flows through, or is at least visible to, the secretary
• Statutory and regulatory deadlines. Making sure the scheme return is filed, the chair's statement is produced where the scheme is required to have one, levy invoices are handled, and anything notifiable reaches The Pensions Regulator on time
• The governance record. Keeping the definitive versions of the trust deed and rules, policies, minutes, registers, and adviser reports, so the board can evidence what it decided and why
• Trustee onboarding and training. Inducting new trustees, maintaining the training log, and tracking Trustee Knowledge and Understanding against the board's needs
• Conflicts and risk. Keeping the conflicts register current, prompting declarations at each meeting, and administering the risk register between formal reviews

The common thread is accountability infrastructure. Every duty on that list exists so that the board's decisions are properly prepared, properly made, and properly recorded.

Is a scheme secretary legally required?

No. UK pensions legislation does not require trustee boards to appoint anyone with the title of scheme secretary. You will not find the role defined in statute the way a scheme actuary or auditor is.

The obligation sits one level up. The Pensions Regulator's General Code expects schemes to operate an effective system of governance, proportionate to their size and complexity, and to be able to evidence it. Meetings must be run, policies reviewed, risks assessed, records kept. None of that happens by itself. In practice, someone has to own the machinery, and that someone is the scheme secretary, whatever their formal job title.

The role is filled in three main ways:

• In-house. Often a pensions manager or governance professional employed by the sponsor, who carries the secretarial role alongside wider scheme responsibilities
• Professional trustee firms. Many offer scheme secretarial services as part of, or alongside, a trustee appointment
• Consultancies. Employee benefit consultancies and specialist governance firms provide outsourced secretariat services, frequently with one secretary supporting several schemes

Proportionality applies here as everywhere in the General Code. A small scheme meeting twice a year does not need the secretariat of a £5bn master trust. But even the smallest scheme has a scheme return to file, minutes to keep, conflicts to manage, and a record to maintain. The workload scales down; the accountability does not.

The model matters less than the outcome: a board that never misses a deadline, never loses a decision, and can show its working. Whoever provides the secretariat, the trustees remain responsible for the governance it produces, which is a good reason to take the appointment as seriously as any adviser selection.

The scheme secretary's annual cycle

The rhythm of the role is quarterly, with an annual layer on top. Most boards meet four times a year, and each meeting typically consumes about ten weeks of secretarial work: agenda planning with the chair typically starts six weeks before the meeting, papers are commissioned from advisers and the administrator, the pack typically goes out one to two weeks before the meeting, draft minutes follow within a couple of weeks after it, and actions are chased continuously until the cycle restarts. Run four of those cycles and the year is nearly full before anything else is added.

The annual layer is what separates a competent secretariat from a reactive one. A typical year looks something like this:

Quarter one: set the year up

Agree the business plan and governance calendar for the year ahead with the chair. Schedule the year's meetings and confirm adviser attendance. Review the conflicts policy and refresh declarations. Confirm the training plan against any gaps identified in the previous year's effectiveness review.

Quarter two: review the machinery

Run the deep-dive review of the risk register, beyond the standing quarterly update. Coordinate the annual review of advisers and service providers due that year. Progress the scheme return and any levy administration. Where a chair's statement is required, plan its production against the accounts timetable.

Quarter three: test the system

Run the trustee effectiveness review and feed its findings into training and succession planning. Review key policies on their scheduled cycle. Under the General Code, keep the scheme's effective system of governance documentation current and progress the own risk assessment on the cadence the board has committed to.

Quarter four: close and carry forward

Confirm every action from the year is closed or consciously carried forward. Complete outstanding regulatory filings. Review the governance calendar's performance (what landed late, what was squeezed) and adjust next year's plan accordingly.

Valuation years compress all of this. A triennial actuarial valuation adds a negotiation between trustees and sponsor, additional meetings, covenant analysis, and a statutory deadline for agreement, all layered on top of the standing cycle. Experienced secretaries plan valuation years as different animals from the start.

Two things distinguish secretaries who run this cycle well. The first is that the calendar is written down and owned, not held in someone's head: every recurring item has a home meeting, an owner, and a lead time. The second is that slippage is managed deliberately. Items will move (they always do), but a good secretariat moves them consciously, records the decision, and makes sure a deferred review cannot quietly become a forgotten one.

Scheme secretary vs pensions manager: what's the difference?

The two titles are often used interchangeably, and in smaller schemes they are often the same person. The distinction is still worth drawing, because the jobs point in different directions.

The scheme secretary governs the board's work. Their client is the trustee board itself: its meetings, its decisions, its record, its compliance with governance expectations. The pensions manager runs the scheme's operations. Their focus is the scheme as a going concern: administration performance, member communications, data quality, project delivery, and the day-to-day relationship with providers.

One looks after how decisions get made; the other looks after what happens once they are. In a small scheme, combining the roles is pragmatic and common. But as governance expectations have grown (more policies to maintain, more reviews to evidence, more documentation expected under the General Code), the secretarial workload has become a discipline in its own right. Boards that treat it as a spare-time activity tend to discover that the governance calendar does not run itself.

What makes the role hard

On paper, the duties look like project management. In practice, the difficulty is structural, and it is the same four problems in almost every scheme.

Version control across email and shared drives. The typical secretary assembles a meeting pack from attachments sent by five different advisers, each of whom may send a revised version days later. Which draft of the covenant report went to the board? Which version of the deed amendment did the lawyers actually sign off? When the record lives in inboxes and folder trees, the honest answer is often a reconstruction rather than a fact.

Chasing actions between meetings. Minutes produce action lists; action lists produce chasing. Without a system, the interval between meetings becomes a cycle of reminder emails, partial responses, and a scramble in the week before the next meeting to establish what was actually done.

Being the single point of institutional memory. A long-serving secretary knows why the board chose its investment adviser, what the sponsor promised in 2019, and where the signed deeds live. That knowledge rarely survives their departure intact. We have written before about board amnesia and key person risk: the scheme secretary is usually the key person in question.

Evidencing governance without a system built for it. The General Code expects boards to demonstrate an effective system of governance, not merely to have one. Producing that evidence from scattered emails, drives, and spreadsheets is slow, and the result is only as good as the filing habits of everyone involved. The secretary ends up assembling proof of good governance from tools that were never designed to record it, usually under time pressure, and usually alone.

None of these problems reflects on the person doing the job. They are what happens when a role built on connected information runs on disconnected tools. The best secretaries compensate with discipline and long memories, which works right up until the day they leave.

What software do scheme secretaries use?

The tooling has moved through three generations. The first was shared drives plus email: free, familiar, and the source of most of the problems above. The second was the board portal, which solved pack distribution (one secure place for papers, read receipts, annotation) but stopped at the meeting itself. Actions, risks, decisions, and history still lived elsewhere. The third generation is the governance platform, which treats the whole cycle (before, during, and after the meeting) as one connected record.

For a secretary evaluating options, the checklist is short:

• Packs, minutes, and decisions in one record. The paper, the discussion, and the outcome should be linked, not filed in three places
• Action tracking built in. Actions created from the minutes, assigned with deadlines, and visible to everyone, so chasing becomes a report rather than a correspondence project
• Plain-English search across the whole history. Knowa Q lets a secretary (or a trustee, or a lawyer) ask a question in ordinary language and get a sourced answer from the scheme's full record, rather than a folder to trawl
• AI-drafted minutes with human sign-off. Knowa Verse produces the draft minutes from the meeting; the secretary reviews, edits, and approves. The judgement stays human, the transcription burden does not
• Security that survives due diligence. ISO 27001 certification and UK data hosting should be the entry ticket, not a differentiator

The multiplier effect is real for professional secretaries. One person running several schemes from a single platform, with each scheme's calendar, actions, and records structured the same way, can carry a materially larger portfolio without the quality of any one scheme's governance slipping. That is a large part of why over 1,000 boards, with more than £300bn of assets under governance, now run on Knowa.

If you carry the secretarial role, see how Knowa supports pension trustee boards, read about AI board meeting software for regulated boards, or book a demo.

The board gets the credit. The secretary makes it deserved.