As the institutional investment community gets to grips with the need for greater professionalism, with pension schemes employing chief investment officers or paying consultants to take responsibility for investment decisions, perhaps this is a good moment to broach another idea: paying trustees bonuses based on the performance of their scheme.

There is some momentum behind this. A decade or so ago, it was rare for trustees to be paid anything for their services; now it is increasingly seen as good practice, certainly at large pension schemes. A class of independent, professional trustees has begun to arise as a sub-industry in its own right.