Legal & General provides MSIPP for Morrisons

Morrisons Group, one of the UK's largest supermarket chains, has joined the growing group of FTSE 100 Companies who now offer their employees' access to a Group Self Invested Pension Plan (SIPP).

The company has expanded its employee benefits provision to include MSIPP, the new Morrisons SIPP, which will run alongside its existing pension arrangements.

Morrisons chose Legal & General because of its reputation as a leading workplace savings company and its ability to fully integrate with existing defined contribution pension arrangements.

Norman Pickavance, Group HR Director at Morrisons said "We believe that employees should have choice and flexibility about how they save for their future. The MSIPP (Morrisons Self Invested Personal Pension) allows employees to do that, and also get more out of their rewards at Morrisons."

The Morrisons scheme will initially be launched in April 2009 to the Group's Executive population and these Employees will be able to make regular payments into the MSIPP. As the new scheme will accept contributions from SAYE schemes, the opportunity to join the MSIPP will be extended to all SAYE Share holders when the first SAYE share scheme matures in July.

Tony Filbin, Legal & General's Managing Director, Workplace Savings said, "We are delighted to have been chosen to provide MSIPP, which caps a very strong 2008 in this market for us.

In 2008 SIPPs accounted for 15% of our corporate pension new business including new schemes for eight FTSE 100 organisations, making us one of the leading workplace saving providers in the UK.

When we launched the UK's first true Corporate SIPP in 2008, with GSK, I believed that by 2012 half the FTSE 100 would have launched Workplace SIPPs to their staff. The key driver for this would be to future proof their company pension schemes. Corporate SIPPs do this by enabling the employer scheme to receive formerly non-pensionable items such as maturing share schemes, and including these alongside existing company pension provision.

Now we are offering companies what I think is a major step forward. A new approach to workplace savings that will enable them to integrate their SIPP or pension with a Corporate ISA.

This will enable employees to take full advantage of the considerable tax benefits of transferring savings from an ISA to a SIPP at a time of their choosing. We are very excited to be launching this ground breaking development.

I believe the development of Corporate ISAs will boost both the uptake of SIPP schemes and give a significant boost to the level of saving through the workplace in general.

Our new Corporate ISA will be available in May 2009 and we are already in early discussions with a number of forward looking employers about integrating an ISA with their existing pension arrangements."