Covenant

Covenant is the trustee board's own governance record for a defined-benefit occupational pension scheme — the file the trustees and their secretariat keep continuously, rather than the report they assemble once a year. It opens on the funding position struck at the last triennial actuarial valuation: technical provisions against assets, a funding level and a shortfall derived from the valuation itself rather than restated by hand, alongside the sponsoring employer's covenant grade, the fixed and floating charge behind it and the parent-company guarantee capping the Schedule of Contributions. From there it holds the working registers of the board. The Schedule of Contributions and recovery plan tracks deficit repair contributions year by year to the recovery plan end date, with the expense allowance met inside each instalment and a paid, due or overdue status against every one. The investment strategy sets the strategic asset allocation against the actual allocation and its drift bands, reports the interest-rate and inflation hedging ratios against target, and names every manager, mandate, benchmark and fee basis in a mandate register. The membership movements register carries actives, deferreds, pensioners and dependants with joiners, retirements, transfers-out and deaths, and a common-data quality score. The risk register grades each risk gross and net with an owner, a mitigation and a review date. The board's own record covers member-nominated and employer-nominated trustees, terms of office and expiry, quarterly meeting attendance, the committees and their terms of reference, and a Trustee Knowledge and Understanding training log per trustee. Discretions casework runs ill-health early retirements, death-benefit nominations and transfer-value quotations to a recorded decision. A compliance calendar holds the Chair's Statement, Scheme Return, Summary Funding Statement, audited accounts, GMP equalisation and dashboard connection against their statutory deadlines, beside an internal disputes and complaints log. Members get a portal with a benefit statement, a transfer-value quotation and a retirement illustration. Designed in the lineage of 1970s corporate annual-report modernism crossed with Isotype pictorial statistics — ink on newsprint, one oxblood signal colour, oversized sectional numerals, repeated pictogram rows for the membership counts and tabular figures throughout.