Ruston Smith, group head of pensions and insurable risk at Tesco, has been named the new chairman of the National Association of Pension Funds, succeeding former Barclays pensions chief Mark Hyde Harrison at the helm of the £900bn UK sector.

Smith, who has been pensions head at Tesco since 2002, will take over the NAPF role at the lobbying organisation's conference in October. Tesco runs one of the last remaining open defined-benefit schemes in the UK, the £7bn Tesco PLC Pension Scheme, into which the retailer began auto-enrolling all its 300,000 staff this year, as a result of government reforms.