USS Pension Chief gets underperformance bonus

The latest USS valuation is out and it is a harbinger of another bunfight.

Josephine Cumbo reports the details for the Financial Times.

Over the year the scheme’s liabilities, or cost of meeting pension promises, climbed from £72.8bn to £79.4bn, according to its annual report published on Wednesday.

This increase in the hypothecated deficit will provide ammunition to VCs and governing bodies that want to continue to shift risk from institutions to employees. Listen for choruses of “everybody else has closed their defined benefits pensions” and “Institutions are facing bankruptcy, this is no longer affordable”.

But it is not all bad news. The CEO of the pension fund is doing very nicely, thank you.

Over the year to March the total value of USS’s assets also slipped from £68.4bn to £67.6bn as its investments underperformed by 1.7 per cent.

Over the period, Mr Galvin’s salary rose from £459,000 to £486,000. Mr Galvin also received performance-related payments of £212,000 more than double the £103,00 of the year before.

How can the USS remuneration committee justify an underperformance bonus?

Almost £700000 in salary and bonus is not huge against the size of the fund. But, senior salaries in the sector and its dependents serve only to highlight that it is not academics that are disconnected from the real world.

Read more on the Financial Times website: https://www.ft.com/content/1598dd15-9515-4af4-8e8a-884a21ebb451