Performing Right Society Pension Scheme

Performing Right Society Pension Scheme

The scheme provides retirement benefits to former and current employees of the UK’s music-rights ecosystem, principally those who worked at Performing Right Society Limited (PRS for Music) and the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society Limited (MCPS). While the precise founding date of the original pension arrangement is not publicly recorded, the fund was known for years as the MCPS-PRS Alliance Pension Scheme before adopting its current name. It exists today as a closed, private-sector defined-benefit plan with no new members accruing service. Its investable assets divide into two visible buckets: a directly owned UK commercial property portfolio and a pool of cash and other liquid instruments. The property portfolio appears to be internally managed or held outside traditional pooled fund structures, giving the trustees direct control over leasing, capital expenditure, and disposal decisions — an unusual degree of operational touch for a pension scheme of its size. The scheme’s sponsoring employer, PRS for Music, collects and distributes over £1 billion annually to rightsholders, providing a stable covenant for the pension fund. The scheme reports under the Financial Reporting Council’s UK Stewardship Code, which commits it to transparent oversight of investee companies, voting policies, and engagement priorities. No separate asset-management subsidiary, foundation, or co-investment club is known to sit alongside the pension trust. Governance rests with a board of trustees overseeing the employer covenant and investment strategy. Structurally, the scheme differs from pooled local-government or master-trust peers: it is a single-employer plan tied to the revenue streams of a copyright-collection society. That means the employer’s health correlates with music-licensing income rather than corporate earnings or tax receipts, giving the scheme’s actuarial position a distinctive economic driver.