Andrew Roberts' Blog: Why SSAS statistics are hard to come by

On Wednesday 21 May, Chris Jones of Suffolk Life will take to the stage at the Annual AMPS conference to give an update on the Sipp market. He will talk about how many policies there are, the value of assets under administration, how those policies are segmented between full Sipps, mid Sipps and commodity Sipps. It's an annual update and we can expect graphs tracking progress, first curated by my fellow Sipp Professional blogger John Moret.I then have to take to the stage and give a similar talk on how the SSAS market is doing. The problem is, I have no idea. And the reason I have no idea is that data on the SSAS market is pretty hard to come by or extrapolate from industry surveys seeing as you don't need to be registered to run a SSAS product. This means that the firms offering pensioneer trustees prior to A-Day have been joined by new entrants (some known, some unknown), businesses such as accountancy and IFA firms that will run some SSASs on-the-side, member trustees who operate without professional assistance and others.The best we can probably do is track the pensioneer trustee firms, and add in new entrants who have joined AMPS as SSAS providers. I'd estimate the market at around 35,000 being broadly flat since HMRC revealed how many occupational investment-regulated pension schemes they had a few years ago, and consistent with figures that the Pensions Regulator issued.HMRC issued details of new scheme registrations in their Pension Schemes Newsletter #57. This showed 13,800 registrations in the 2007-08 tax year, followed by 10,600, 7,400, 6,900, and finally 7,200 for 2011-12. (figures for 2006-07 were unavailable as those figures included all Pre A Day schemes).Nevertheless, the data presented in Newsletter #57 adds up to 45,900 new schemes in five years, an average of 9,000 a year. These will not all be SSASs of course and of course there are some SSASs that are winding up, so you can't really use these figures.{desktop}{/desktop}{mobile}{/mobile}In Newsletter #60 issued in February 2014, HMRC revealed that there had been a staggering 15,140 new applications in the 2012/13 tax year – quite an increase not fully explained by auto-enrolment. That same newsletter said that in the 2013/14 tax year there had been 13,901 registrations up to 31 January 2014. (We await data for the full tax year). Again, these figures are not all SSASs.These figures pre-date the Budget 2014 announcement about changing the registration process and requiring a fit and proper test for scheme administrators, but did show a decrease in registrations following the interim change brought in October 2013.I hope that I will be able to give some insight into the SSAS market at the conference, but I expect that my insight will be more anecdotal than Chris's more evidence-based graphical wonder.If any readers have a decent idea of how to assess the size of the SSAS market on evidence, I would be interested to hear your post comments.Andrew Roberts, Partner, Barnett Waddingham LLP@andrewddroberts

Andrew Roberts' Blog: Why SSAS statistics are hard to come by

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