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Royal Mail’s new pension scheme, the first of its kind in the UK, fell almost 5 per cent in its first six months, raising questions over the level of future payouts for its more than 100,000 members who include postal workers.

The Royal Mail Collective Pension Plan, a collective defined contribution (CDC) scheme launched in October last year after six years of planning, dropped 4.6 per cent by the end of March, compared to a 3.6 per cent decline in its benchmark index, according to its results seen by the Financial Times.

The results come as the government wants to encourage wider take-up of such schemes, which offer a halfway house between traditional defined-benefit pension plans that offer predictable payouts, and defined-contribution plans, where income is based on contributions and investment performance.

The postal group’s CDC was the first to be set up after the schemes were allowed in 2021 and its performance will be closely watched by other employers. The government hopes the pooled products will boost incomes for retirees and channel savings into a wider range of assets.

But people familiar with Royal Mail’s CDC, which has 110,000 members, stressed that it was too early to draw conclusions about payouts in the long term. The fund was just getting started, and flows and timing had an outsized impact on returns, they added.

A spokesperson for the CDC said it was “designed to hold long-term growth investments that allow for short-term volatility” and that it had delivered “positive” returns since the end of March.

The results showed that 77 per cent of the fund, which had £192mn of assets at the start of April, was invested in global equities that follow a benchmark designed for investors who want their portfolios to match a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C.

The fund had 9 per cent in small-cap equities and another 9 per cent in emerging market stocks. BlackRock, the outsourced chief investment officer for the scheme, declined to comment.

CDC members participate in a pooled scheme and are offered a target return around which they can plan their retirements. But returns are not fixed and companies are not obliged to make up any funding shortfalls.

John Ralfe, an independent pensions consultant, said the “real issue” was a lack of clarity about how performance — up or down — translates to a change in target pensions. He said that Royal Mail CDC must be “entirely transparent” about its calculations and the impact on different age groups.

Royal Mail plans to update scheme members on their target pensions and how these are calculated in the spring.

Pensions minister Torsten Bell told the Financial Times in October that new regulations allowing multiple private-sector employers to join collective defined contribution schemes could boost retirement incomes by 25 to 60 per cent.

While it was “too early to say” if CDC products would become the main option across the UK’s £600bn workplace defined-contribution market, “we should be confident that this will play a significant part in our future pension system”, Bell said.

Royal Mail’s parent company, International Distribution Services, was taken over last year by EP Group, headed by Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský, who vowed to improve the financial strength of the postal service. The businessman is known for his investments in UK supermarket chain J Sainsbury and football club West Ham United.