Most sustainability reports now go well beyond carbon footprints and water use. Employers routinely disclose how they treat people, too: pay, safety, working conditions. But one significant financial decision an employer makes on an employee’s behalf rarely makes it into that picture: the pension scheme they’re automatically signed up to on day one.
That’s worth pausing on. The scale of money involved here dwarfs most of what gets measured under social sustainability, and a report that speaks to employee wellbeing while never once looking at this particular decision may be leaving out one of the larger pieces of it.
An unforeseen spot in social reporting
Social sustainability is a question about outcomes, not intentions: do the people an organisation employs actually end up better off over time, not just in the current reporting period? The GRI Standards, used by organisations across the world for sustainability disclosure, include a category for retirement provision. GRI 201-3, part of the GRI 201: Economic Performance 2016 standard, which remains the current version for this disclosure, covers defined benefit plan obligations specifically.
Most UK employees today are auto-enrolled into defined contribution schemes rather than defined benefit ones, so this particular disclosure doesn’t map neatly onto the pension type most workers actually have. That mismatch is itself worth noting: it suggests existing reporting frameworks may not have fully caught up with how workplace pensions are now structured, leaving DC default fund performance sitting in something of an unforeseen spot, a corner of the picture that most standards weren’t quite built to cover.
In practice, retirement provision doesn’t seem to get the same billing as pay equity, health and safety, or training in workforce-focused sustainability commentary, though this is an impression rather than something I’ve seen measured systematically. What’s clearer is the scale of what’s being decided: a pension default is a major financial commitment an employer makes on an employee’s behalf, frequently without the employee ever actively choosing it.
There may be a reasonable explanation for that. Pension performance plays out over decades, which sits awkwardly inside a reporting cycle built around a single year, and it’s a technical area that can be easy to set and forget once a provider is chosen. Whatever the reason, the outcome itself- how someone’s retirement savings actually perform- stays material to their long-term wellbeing whether it fits neatly into a report.
The scale of the outcome gap
Independent data, published by Corporate Adviser and referenced directly on TPT’s own site, gives a sense of what’s actually at stake. Looking at the 10 years to December 2025, Aon’s Managed Core default delivered a cumulative return of 232% for savers, the highest of any provider measured, and nearly three times the weakest performer over the same period, Now: Pensions, which returned 88%. LifeSight came second at 226.78%, and TPT Retirement Solutions came third with 182.73%. The average across all providers measured, the CAPA average, came in at 139.37% over the same 10-year period.
Most employees in these schemes never actively picked a fund. The default is set by whichever provider the employer selected, so the outcome gap ends up shaping people’s retirement savings without them ever having exercised a choice over the decision that produced it. A company reporting on employee wellbeing while sitting on the wrong end of that gap, unreviewed, is making a claim its own pension default may not support.
A related concern was raised at the PLSA’s ESG conference, where Charles Wookey, CEO of A Blueprint for Better Business, argued that social (‘S’) data across the investment industry lags a decade behind environmental (‘E’) data in terms of quality and rigour. Pension performance looks like one illustration of that broader point: a number this large, sitting inside a decision this consequential, and still largely absent from most social sustainability disclosures.
Picture a company that reports diligently on carbon intensity, water use, and supply chain labour standards, but has never once checked whether its own pension default fund is actually performing. That leaves a real gap in its social sustainability picture, one that raises a fair question about whether the report is telling the full story. The employees behind that pension are the same employees any social report is nominally there to protect.
Making the case internally
None of this calls for a formal ESG metric overnight. Retirement outcomes don’t need a scorecard to start mattering. What it calls for is putting the question to whoever already owns pension decisions internally and treating the answer as part of the wellbeing conversation rather than a line item nobody revisits.
That conversation could start with a simple test: can anyone in the organisation say, with a specific date, when the default fund’s performance was last checked? Not the fee structure, not the compliance box, the actual returns members are getting. If the honest answer is “we’re not sure,” that uncertainty seems worth raising internally, in something like the way an unreviewed safety protocol or an unmonitored pay gap might be.
From there, the shift is less about adding a new disclosure and more about asking whether “wellbeing,” as it’s already reported, is drawn as widely as it could be. Pay equity and working conditions have earned a place in most social reporting, presumably because someone judged them material to how employees fare over time. It’s reasonable to argue that a pension default, chosen once on someone’s behalf and left running for years, deserves a similar degree of scrutiny, given the scale of money quietly riding on it.
A fair test for a provider, then, might be less about the size of its brand or the size of its fee, and more about whether it can show its actual numbers rather than simply promise good ones.
Social sustainability, at its core, is about whether the people an organisation is responsible for end up genuinely better off because of decisions made for them. A pension default fund, selected once, rarely revisited, looks like exactly that kind of decision. Leaving it out of the conversation doesn’t make it neutral; it just leaves the sustainability report a little less complete than it could be.