New pension scheme at House of Fraser

Department-store chain House of Fraser has partnered with corporate pensions, risk and healthcare service provider Johnson Fleming to deliver a new Aviva group personal pension (GPP) for its 7,000 UK employees.

The new scheme was introduced in July 2012 following a thorough review of the company’s pension arrangements and coincided with the closure to future accrual of House of Fraser’s defined benefit (DB) scheme at the end of June 2012.

“Targeting key messages to different groups of employees is important as we are rolling the new scheme out over several months,” says Suzanne Willshire, House of Fraser’s pensions manager. “Employees who were previously members of our DB schemes were invited to join first. Those who were in our stakeholder scheme are being invited to join now and we will then move on to new employees. Our autoenrolment population, which is over 6,000 staff, will be the final group and we intend to enrol them ahead of our staging date.”

To enable employees to manage their retirement planning online, House of Fraser developed a bespoke pension microsite.