Ethical Pensions

Finding an ethical pension provider

This guide rates ethical pension from 23 providers. In theory, all of these are 'ethical' or 'sustainable' in some way. However, the difference in scores between the pension providers at the top and those at the bottom of our ethical ratings table, shows that some ethical pensions are more ethical than others.

Ethical pensions can have a big impact

It is crucial that we see pensions as more than just a route to later-life financial security. Most people’s pension will be the largest investment they ever hold, so choosing an ethical pension is one of the most ethically productive things you can do.

Global pension funds control an estimated $63 trillion in assets — over four times the value of all sovereign wealth funds combined. That’s a staggering slice of global capital, invested across energy companies, tech giants, banks, real estate, and every corner of the economy. And it is managed in our name.

According to Make My Money Matter, £3,000 per UK pension saver is invested in fossil fuels, and 83%
of providers have inadequate or poor policies on fossil fuels. 

But pensions don’t necessarily spring to mind when you think about climate change, injustice, or inequality. They’re slow moving, admin heavy, and are generally absent from our thoughts unless nearing or daydreaming about retirement. But behind that curtain of banality lies a quiet power shaping the world.

Pension funds could feasibly be used to tackle the climate crisis and combat global inequalities.

Yet £300bn of UK pension capital is invested in companies with a high risk of driving deforestation. 

And another £88bn is invested in the fossil fuel industry. According to ClimateSafe Pensions, pension funds hold 30% of fossil fuel industry shares worldwide.

If this doesn't sit well with you, read on to find out what your ethical pensions options are. 

Why do pensions matter?

We might like to think that the investors pushing profit over people and planet are just greedy individuals – the domain of flashy billionaires and shadowy boardrooms – but the reality is more uncomfortable. Pensions, which are supposed to ensure a secure future, are among the very institutions driving extractive and unjust practices
in the present.

As citizens we have a collective expectation that our pension will fund our retirement – it’s a cornerstone of the social contract in many parts of the world. But, in order to make that future pot as big as possible, asset managers of workplace or personal pensions are incentivised to prioritise financial growth over all else.

Changing long-standing investment norms is no easy task but demanding better from the investments that we can control, such as our pension, is an important start.

What do pension providers do?

Pensions are complex. This is chiefly a guide to pension providers, which are the companies that manage your workplace or personal pension. These providers invest your money in one or more pension funds, but they often do not actually manage these funds themselves. The ratings therefore also consider the pension funds that each provider uses, alongside the asset management companies that control them.

Pension providers can design plans with defined investment criteria, such as the high scoring Nest Ethical Fund and PensionBee’s Climate Plan. These plans include stringent exclusions (they don’t invest in problematic sectors) and positive screening criteria (they choose to invest in positive sectors).

Yet, like many providers in the guide, both of these companies outsource much of the actual investment. Nest uses a range of asset managers including Lombard Odier, BlackRock, Amundi, while PensionBee’s Climate fund is managed by SSGA.

Readers may be startled that we could recommend a product managed by a company so widely criticised as BlackRock, but this really speaks to how low the bar is in the pension world. Pension funds are generally managed by the world’s largest asset managers, not by ethically minded upstarts. If you are choosing your own investments, you may have access to funds run by more ethical asset managers. See our guide to ethical investment funds for more information.

Some companies in the guide are major asset managers themselves such as L&G, M&G and Royal London. Others, such as PensionBee, are platforms, and these allow individual savers to pick and choose investments from a range of externally managed funds.

Part of the challenge in producing a meaningful ethical comparison comes from the fact that pensions are offered by such different types of companies. But although these companies often have quite distinct functions, we believe that they share a responsibility to invest your pension responsibly and transparently.

What makes a pension ethical?

There isn’t a 'one size fits all' model for an ethical pension as people’s ideas of what constitutes an unethical investment will vary. 

At the most basic level, we look to see if a company has an ethical investment policy at all. If so, we look at the detail of the policy to see if it:

• excludes investment in problematic sectors e.g. human rights violators and fossil fuel extractors
• prioritises investment in positive sectors, like green infrastructure and the renewable energy transition.

We also look to see if it applies to all its investments, or just some of them. For example, most asset managers have some very basic standards governing all their investments (nearly all exclude investments in manufacturers of “controversial” weapons) and also have a more detailed policy that governs their sustainable or ethical funds, but doesn’t cover their other investments.

Pension funds need to balance these requirements with the need for stable growth. A pension fund has failed if it is heavily reliant on a single company that collapses, writing off 20% of your pension pot a month before retirement. 

Ethical pensions should also be more transparent about its investments, so that you know where your money is going. Do they disclose all their investments, or do they only disclose the top ten holdings?

Pensions are typically risk-averse investments, and managed pension plans tend to become increasingly so as you approach retirement. A managed pension plan will typically be invested heavily in equities (company shares) when you are young, and shift towards safer but lower reward investments like government bonds and cash as you approach retirement.

But as our research has found for this guide, even pension plans branded as ethical or sustainable may contain an element of greenwashing. Some brands scored under 20 (out of 100), in our ethical rating system, suggesting that the 'planet fund' or 'sustainable fund' are not that ethical. 

We have rated brands on a variety of issues including:

• climate
• tax
• company ethos
• investment policy
• bonds & underwriting.

For more detail on our investment policy rating see the current account guide.

For the bonds & underwriting rating we used five NGO reports, each of which has reviewed financial companies for their involvement in a harmful sector of the economy. Each company started with a score of 100 and lost points if it was featured in a report. The reports or research we used were:

• Don't Buy into Occupation 2024 (DBIO Coalition)
• Forest 500 (Global Canopy)
• Oil and Gas Policy Tracker
• Don’t Bank on the Bomb 2023 (PAX and ICAN – the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons)
• Ensuring Genocide

What do pensions invest in?

Some people probably dismiss 'ethical' pensions and wryly assume that they invest in some combination of hemp, organic deodorant, and vegan yogurt. If this sounds rather good, prepare to be underwhelmed when you look at the top holdings of an ethical pension fund.

At the time of writing, the People’s Pension Ethical Fund’s top five holdings were in Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple Inc, Amazon, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company). This is very much typical for ethical pension funds – expect to see plenty of these five, plus commonly Visa, Mastercard, Meta, Tesla, and generally plenty of US based finance, technology, and consultancy firms.

Underwhelming, yes, but not a reason to abandon the ethical pension ship altogether. It is because pension funds are inherently risk averse that their top holdings are so generic. There might be some pioneering, environmental startups somewhere in the fund, but the main holdings are dominated by what the fund manager sees as safe bets.

Of course, whether Tesla and US tech behemoths still count as either safe bets or ethical investments looks increasingly questionable as Trumpism deepens its grip on the country.

These types of investments might seem disappointing, and it's certainly true that there is no equivalent of ethical finance pioneers like Triodos or Charity Bank in the world of pensions. You will not find a pension that exclusively finances, say, wind farms and community projects.

It is therefore important to also pay attention to what an ethical fund chooses not to invest in.

Nest’s default fund and Israeli arms investment

A May 2025 Novara Media article found that Nest’s default funds were invested in Israel’s largest defence company, Elbit Systems. This is deeply disappointing. We do not recommend using any default funds, including Nest's, because they typically have minimal restrictions on problematic sectors such as arms. None of the default funds from any providers in our guide have restrictions that would stop them investing in Elbit. Indeed, most providers are far less transparent on their investments than Nest is, so those links are near impossible to find elsewhere. 

If you hold a Nest pension, we strongly recommend contacting them and asking them to divest from Elbit, and move your pension into its Ethical Fund if you haven’t already.

What do ethical pensions exclude?

Fund managers can choose to exclude certain sectors from their funds. Common exclusions in ethical funds include thermal coal, gambling, tobacco, alcohol, weapons, and pornography. In theory, if a company makes a certain amount of revenue from these activities, it will be excluded from the fund. Exclusion thresholds are often set at 5-10% of a company's overall revenue, but some funds set them a lot higher. For example, if a fund excludes investments in companies that sell tobacco and the maximum revenue threshold is 10%, that means that the fund will not invest in any company that makes more than 10% of its total revenues from the sale of tobacco.

Some pension providers set exclusions for a particular pension plan. These include Aviva’s Stewardship plan, the Nest Ethical Fund, PensionBee’s Climate Plan, and The People’s Pension Ethical Fund.

These plans make it easy for customers to see which exclusions are being applied, and provide reassurance that these rules will be enforced even if their money is moved between different funds within the plan.

Other providers may highlight a list of ethical or sustainable investment funds which you can choose from and which will likely have the same exclusions. For example, L&G’s Future World series, Prudential’s PruFund Planet range, and Royal London's Sustainable Fund range.

The table below shows some of the exclusions offered by the various ethical or ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) pension plans and fund series in this guide. It does not include platform providers that do not manage pension plans themselves (Bestinvest, ii, and MoneyFarm).

If you are selecting your own funds or want to dig deeper into a managed pension plan, you will usually be able to obtain fund factsheets and key investor information documents from your provider’s website. If not, you can email them and request these. These documents will show which, if any, exclusions are applied to that particular fund. Look for concrete commitments, and keep an eye out for vague promises like “we will aim to exclude ...”, or “where possible we will exclude ...”.

We do not have the space to assess all the pension funds offered by each provider: major asset managers like Aviva, L&G, and Fidelity will give you access to hundreds of pension funds. We have instead focused on the managed pension plans or responsible fund series offered by each provider.

The importance of transparency

In researching this guide, it was difficult to see the companies that most pension plans were invested in, as the vast majority of funds only reveal their top 10 holdings. As discussed above, these tend to be dominated by large, low-risk firms like Apple and Microsoft, so it is near impossible to tell whether a supposedly ethical fund is actively investing in positive environmental or social action.

Some funds provide total transparency and publicly reveal their full holdings. PensionBee’s Climate Plan discloses its full holdings every month, for example. Nest too has a web app which shows which companies each of its funds are invested in. Aviva discloses full holdings for all of its funds, while L&G and Royal London only appeared to disclose certain funds.

A few pension providers do not disclose all holdings publicly but do have a tool for pension holders themselves to view their investments. Aviva, Cushon (NatWest), Fidelity, L&G, and Penfold have all announced partnerships with a company called Tumelo, which allows savers to tell their fund managers how they think they should vote on issues that are important to them at company AGMs. PensionBee also surveys pension holders regularly and uses their responses to shape its voting choices.

Types of workplace pension

There are two types of workplace pension schemes.

Defined Contribution(DC)

Personal pensions and private sector workplace pensions tend to be Defined Contribution schemes. You pay money into the pension, this money is invested and grows over time. The amount that you receive upon retirement is dependent on how much you invested and how well those investments performed. There are no guarantees with this form of pension, i.e. your investments can lose value, but plans are typically diversified, and are therefore (theoretically) well protected against stock market fluctuations.

Defined Benefit (DB)

Defined Benefit schemes are more common in the public sector, and offer a guaranteed income for life at retirement. The money is managed by a board of trustees, and individual pension savers typically have less control over it. This is because there isn’t specific capital allocated to each pension holder. Instead, the pot is managed collectively, and all responsibility and liability for that money is held by the scheme.

This guide is focused on DC pensions, but there may still be ethical options within your DB pension trust. We recommend contacting your scheme to ask which ethical investment criteria they apply, and whether they offer any ethical alternative funds.

Make My Money Matter's pension campaign

Make My Money Matter (MMMM), which campaigned to get pensions away from fossil fuels, came to a close in March 2025.

Over its five years, it helped get at least 60 leading pension schemes to set net zero targets, including halving emissions this decade, representing over £1.5tn of assets.

Its campaign materials are still available, and stress that stronger action is still urgently needed given the severity of the climate and nature emergency.

In its February 2025 Climate Action report, which ranked the 12 largest Defined Contribution workplace pension providers MMMM said,

“£88bn of UK pension savers’ money is invested in fossil fuels. £300bn of our money is invested in companies with a high risk of driving deforestation.”

In the MMMM report, Nest came top, and Aviva and NOW were joint second, though Aviva was rated as poor on fossil fuels.

The MMMM report also looked at providers’ engagement with the companies they were invested in, and stated, “Some pension funds argue that they need to stay invested in these companies to use their shareholder power to push for progress, but the reality is that their shareholder stewardship is often weak, such as voting in support of the company’s management at annual meetings.”

Even strong stewardship does not necessarily lead to strong climate action as it showed in the case of Aviva and L&G. MMMM states that for every £10 you put in your pension, £2 is linked to deforestation, but policies on deforestation are even poorer than on fossil fuels. Only L&G was rated as adequate. Only 25% of the pension providers ranked disclosed a breakdown of investments in the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use sectors. These pension providers include Fidelity, Legal & General, Nest, and Scottish Widows. However, none of these reported on the associated emissions of the investments.

Do ethical pensions perform well?

There is no reason to assume that sustainable investments will perform worse than other investments. 

According to Nest, its ethical fund has outperformed its default Retirement Date funds overall since they launched, with an average growth rate of 8.9% compared to 8.3%. Its ethical fund also has the same annual fees and charges as its conventional fund. Other providers, like PensionBee, charge very slightly more for their ethical products.

A recent Morgan Stanley report found that ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) funds outperformed peers in most asset classes in 2023, showing that there is a link between sustainable businesses and financial growth. Indeed, in the same year, the green economy grew 9% while the rest of the economy expanded by just 1%. However, the sector has seen more recent performance volatility. 

Lack of vegan pension options

In April 2025, World Animal Protection reported that one of the world’s biggest pension funds, ABP, had adopted an animal welfare policy after campaigns highlighted the $8bn it had invested in companies that either financially support or are directly involved in factory farming.

During our research, we found only two pension providers in this guide mentioning any restrictions on factory farming. These were Nest, whose Ethical Fund excluded "unsustainable intensive farming" and Aegon, whose Ethically Screened funds excluded “all intensive farming, and producers and retailers of meat and dairy, alongside companies engaged in cosmetic animal testing”.

We have been contacted by a few readers about the lack of a vegan pension option. One wrote that a financial advisor had told them that, “it was not possible to exclude pharmaceutical companies (and therefore not possible to exclude animal testing) unless one has a very expensive individual portfolio.”

We did find an option in the US called the Vegan Climate Fund, which aims to avoid large companies working in animal testing, animal products, animal farming, animals in sport and entertainment, and genetically engineered animals. Instead, it invests in medium-sized companies creating vegan, plant-based, and cruelty-free products and services.

The fund’s managers told us: “Investors could potentially look at the top 10 stocks of each of our US, International, Europe and Global indexes (which are published on the beyondinvesting.com website) and create a relatively diversified portfolio from these stocks which have all gone through our screens.

"We would love to work with any pension provider who wishes to offer vegan pensions, since we have the ability to generate portfolios using our screens across all listed stocks and bonds.”

You can visit www.veganetf.com for a copy of the prospectus of the US Vegan Climate ethical fund.

How do pension providers score on ethical and environmental issues?

Below we have highlighted how the pension providers rate in our system for important issues like climate change, tax, transparency and investment in unethical practices such as armaments.

Pensions and climate impact

Only two companies scored more than zero in our climate rating. 

All companies in the guide lost points for investing in fossil fuels, but Nest and PensionBee lost fewer for having a fossil-free option available, and for investing in “climate solutions” such as renewable infrastructure. 

Aviva, Aegon, The People’s Pension, and Scottish Widows also had plans or fund series which excluded fossil fuels but appeared less focused on investing in climate solutions. Other providers may have individual fossil-free funds, but it was unclear if these could be used within a managed plan.

Tax conduct

Our tax rating found a big divide, with most companies scoring either 100 or 0. 

Aegon, L&G, and Virgin scored 70 as they had subsidiaries in tax havens but had good narratives to explain why they were not part of a tax avoidance strategy. Hargreaves Lansdown scored 80 as it was only its minority owner that was registered in a tax haven.

Company ethos

Three companies scored in the company ethos category. 

Nest and People’s Partnership were both not-for-profit organisations, while Royal London scraped a 10 for being mutually owned.

Investment Policy rating

This rating assessed which exclusions were covered in their ethical or sustainable plans and also considered whether they had a responsible investing policy that covered all of their funds. 

The highest scorers in the investment policy category were Aviva’s Stewardship Funds, Nest's Ethical Fund and PensionBee’s Climate Plan. 

UK pension review

In summer 2024, the UK government launched a Pensions Investment Review. It is proposing to legislate for a minimum size and maximum number of direct contribution pension scheme default funds, and for local government pension schemes (LGPS) to consolidate their assets too. Its final report was published on 29 May 2025, after our guide was written.

One of the main objectives is to “increase saver returns”. If pension funds are consolidated into larger bodies, they will be more able to take riskier investments that can offer higher returns. They also want the funds to invest more in the UK. So do Finance Innovation Lab, which is leading a coalition of civil society organisations in a campaign to raise the government’s ambitions for the Review. It argues that if more of UK pension savings were invested in the UK, this could support the switch to clean and affordable energy and upgrading of the UK’s housing stock.

You can sign at the Finance Innovation Lab petition on 350.org/pensions. It calls for the UK government to:

• Deliver decent pensions for all.
• Fund a just transition to a thriving low-carbon economy.
• Phase out investment in fossil fuels, deforestation, and other harmful industries.

Make My Money Matter has cautioned that the review must ensure that smaller climate leaders are not consolidated into larger climate laggards like Standard Life and Royal London.

Challenging corporate power

While we are pushing for pension funds to move away from harmful investments, and suggesting they could instead help finance a green transition, we should be wary of the increasing power of private and profit-motivated finance in public projects. If a government turns to private finance (from pension funds or insurance companies, for example) to fund housing, infrastructure, and the green transition, those private companies will be wanting high returns on this investment, which makes it more expensive.

The co-director of the Financial Inclusion Centre, Mick McAteer, argues that while private finance might appear to be a short-term fix that keeps costs off the state balance sheet, there will be a price to pay.

Brett Christophers, author of Our Lives in Their Portfolios, used the example of the privatisation of English and Welsh water. Since 1989, £72bn has gone to shareholders – around £2bn a year on average. The water companies also built up a debt mountain of £53bn, much of it going to finance dividends for shareholders. As a result, water bills in England and Wales have gone up by 40% in real terms.

“A big challenge for campaigners and civil society organisations will be preventing the private finance sector from exploiting these new opportunities to the max”, says McAteer. “But, it may be possible for campaigners to limit the value extraction by ensuring the design and implementation is scrutinised and abuses exposed.”

Economics professor Daniela Gabor, writing in the Guardian, calls these public-private partnerships “government-by-BlackRock” – BlackRock being the largest asset manager in the world, managing about $10tn. We need to find a way to “repair a serious failure of macroeconomic policy imagination that regards the public purse as too small to fund transformative public infrastructure”, says Gabor.

Maybe it is even possible to democratise finance, including pensions.

Michael McCarthy, author of The Master's Tools: How finance Wrecked Democracy, talks about the privatisation of pension provision in the last decades (focused on the US), and how the retail workers’ pension fund in the Netherlands recently decided to experiment with democratic governance, and after a process of deliberation the current and future retirees decided to prioritise social good over maximising returns.
 

Book review

Pension Gangster: a no-nonsense guide to ethical pensions, investments and banking by Tim Ewins

Tim Ewins’ backgrounds in both stand up comedy and ethical finance (he is a chartered financial advisor) make this book entertaining and informative in equal measure. Pensions are complex beasts, but Ewins’ knack for metaphor and anecdote ensures that this comprehensive deep dive never drowns in jargon or over explanation. Over the course of the book he sets out the steps any individual can take to align their finances with their ethics, irrespective of personal fortune.

The book has the space to go deep into the detail, so if this guide has only whetted your pension appetite then we’d strongly recommend giving Pensions Gangster a read. 

What has changed in the sector?

Plenty has shifted in the world of pensions since we released our last guide in 2023. Circa5000, which was trying to offer a sustainability-focused alternative to standard investment platforms, shut down permanently in the summer of 2024. PensionBee’s Impact plan, a previously recommended product, was closed to new members in 2025, but has been replaced with its Climate Plan, which we also recommend.

The Impact Plan was managed by BlackRock, which, according to PensionBee, wished to move away from an impact investing strategy – one that closely engages with investee companies – to a “sustainable strategy that will use advanced computing systems with human oversight for stock selection.”

Skilled, resource-intensive human labour being replaced by advanced computing, who would have thought? PensionBee felt that this change would not “align with our customers’ expectations” and therefore developed its new Climate Plan.

Additional research by Ruth Strange.