The winners of the Financial News award for Best DC Plan Design are always innovators. But not many can claim to have pre-empted the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The Cheviot Trust, a multi-employer DC scheme for legal firms, did not have any inside information when it decided, in 2013, to start offering a post-retirement investment fund within the scheme. Yet, it was just a year later that George Osborne threw the pensions industry into convulsions with a pledge to scrap the tax rules that have traditionally encouraged people to use their DC pensions pots to buy annuities.