News updates

Your feedback matters, and we listen carefully to what you tell us.

We want you to feel confident that your pension contributions are invested in a way that aims to deliver good financial returns for you.

One way we do this is through our sustainable ownership approach. This means  we consider the sustainability and governance risks and opportunities that are most likely to affect your financial outcomes. Evidence shows that companies that manage these risks well often perform better over time.

Here’s what you told us this time about investing your pension sustainably.

Who took part

Over 1,500 randomly selected members of the Railways Pension Scheme responded during November and December 2025.

Participants represented a wide range of backgrounds, ages, roles, and levels of investment knowledge.

The highlights

Your priorities

Your top concerns have stayed consistent over time:

• 42% chose ‘social’ issues
• 33% governance
• 26% environmental impact

'Social' issues - such as how well a company treats its workforce and whether it pays it fairly - continue to dominate concerns.

Over the last couple of years, ‘social’ issues also came out first in members priority issues.

Nearly 47% of you said that ‘fair pay for workers’ should remain a key focus in our discussions with companies and in our investment decisions. However, key governance issues - whether companies are run by the right people and supported by effective systems and processes - like reliable and accurate company reporting and making sure company boards can be held to account also remain top priorities.

Your views on our influencing role

• 84% think it is either extremely, quite or somewhat important that we try to influence the behavior of companies to do better on governance and sustainability.
• 85% think it is either extremely, quite or somewhat important that we try to influence law and regulations to do better on governance and sustainability issues. 

Understanding your pension and our sustainable ownership work

We need to do more to help you understand our work on your behalf:

• 67% said they ‘understand somewhat’ or ‘understand well’ how their pension works
• 58% said they aren’t familiar with the term ‘sustainable ownership’
• 76% haven’t seen any communications on sustainable ownership, and
• 82% haven’t seen any related publications

This tells us most members remain unaware of the sustainable ownership work we do to help improve your financial outcomes.

What we’ll do next

We are acting on your feedback. We will:

• Improve communication - clearer, more frequent updates on how we invest and why.
• Increase transparency - sharing more examples of how sustainable ownership supports good financial outcomes.
• Enhance targeting and frequency - we’ll make sure information about sustainable ownership reaches you more often and in ways that are easy to access and understand. We’ll rely less on long PDFs and will do shorter updates in different formats.

Where to find more information on sustainable ownership

Head to the dedicated page on your member website. It offers an at-a-glance overview of what sustainable ownership is and why it matters. 

Have a read of the blogs on sustainable ownership topics. Or watch short videos on the topic.

Read the Sustainable Ownership Member Review – a member-friendly report of our work in this field.