A regulator that spends most of its year poring over trading algorithms and crypto exchange tokens has just turned its attention to something far more old-fashioned: whether the firm running your self-invested personal pension actually checks what it's buying before it buys it. On 22 June 2026, the Financial Conduct Authority published Consultation Paper CP26/20 — Adapting our rules for a changing market: self-invested personal pensions — and underneath the dry title sits a fairly blunt message. Some SIPP operators, the regulator says, have been getting away with patchy due diligence, weak record-keeping and gaps in how they safeguard the money and assets sitting inside your pension wrapper, and it wants that fixed before more people get hurt by it.
What the FCA actually found
CP26/20 didn't appear out of nowhere. It builds directly on Discussion Paper DP24/3, published back in December 2024, in which the FCA first asked the industry how SIPP regulation should adapt to a market that's grown far beyond its original shape. Since then the regulator has spoken to operators, trustees, platforms and consumer groups, and what it heard clearly wasn't reassuring. Its own supervisory work turned up SIPP operators with inconsistent standards for vetting the investments they allow into a scheme, thin or disorganised records of who owns what and when it was bought, and — in the cases that matter most when a firm gets into trouble — real uncertainty over how pension scheme money and assets would actually be protected if the operator failed or wound down. None of that is abstract. When a SIPP operator collapses, the assets inside every scheme it administers are only as safe as the systems that were supposed to be tracking them, and the FCA's own findings suggest those systems have not been consistent across the market.
Two problems, one consultation
The proposals split cleanly into two strands. The first sets out clear, consistent standards of due diligence that every SIPP operator would have to apply before accepting an investment into a scheme — closing the gap between operators who already vet assets rigorously and those who wave almost anything through. The second creates a new Pension Scheme Money and Assets regime, aimed squarely at operators that rely on unauthorised trustees to hold client money and assets, with stronger requirements for how that money is segregated, recorded and protected.
Neither strand is dramatic on its own.
Together, though, they represent the most direct attempt yet to standardise what "good" looks like across a market that has historically let smaller, execution-only operators set their own bar. Charlotte Clark, the FCA's Director of Cross-Cutting Policy and Strategy, put it plainly: SIPPs "provide consumers with flexibility and choice," and the point of the consultation is to help people "invest with greater confidence by ensuring standards are consistent" across every provider, not just the well-known ones.
The 5.3 million people this actually touches
SIPPs are not a niche pension product any more. The FCA's own figures put assets under administration across the sector at around £567 billion, held on behalf of roughly 5.3 million consumers — a market that has grown well past the point where inconsistent standards among a subset of operators can be treated as a rounding error. If you've ever transferred a workplace pension into a SIPP to get access to funds, investment trusts or individual shares your old scheme didn't offer, you're one of those 5.3 million, whether your provider is a household name or one you found through a comparison site three years ago and haven't thought about since.
What changes, and when
This is a consultation, not a final rulebook, and it's worth being precise about the timeline because the FCA has been. Feedback on CP26/20 closes on 24 August 2026. A policy statement and the final Handbook text are targeted for the first half of 2027, and even then operators won't be expected to comply overnight: firms would get roughly a year from the date final rules are published to meet the new due diligence standards, and up to two years — extendable to three where a firm depends on third-party data it doesn't control — to fully implement the Pension Scheme Money and Assets regime. Nothing in your SIPP changes this month. What changes this month is that the clock has started on a process that, by mid-2027, is very likely to end with every SIPP operator in the country working to the same due diligence floor. That staged runway roughly mirrors how the FCA phased in the Consumer Duty back in 2023 — a headline deadline for the rules to exist, then a longer, quieter window for firms to actually meet them.
Who this is really aimed at
Here's the part worth being honest about: if your SIPP sits with Hargreaves Lansdown, AJ Bell, interactive investor or Vanguard and holds mainstream funds, investment trusts and listed shares, CP26/20 is unlikely to change much about your day-to-day experience — those platforms already run the kind of due diligence and custody arrangements the FCA is trying to make universal. The sting is aimed at the smaller, execution-only end of the market, where SIPPs have historically been used as a wrapper for unregulated or illiquid investments — unlisted shares, overseas land banking schemes, storage pod investments and similar — that generated years of complaints to the Financial Ombudsman precisely because due diligence on the way in was minimal or absent. If your SIPP holds anything outside a mainstream platform's standard fund range, this consultation is about you specifically, not about the market in the abstract.
That distinction matters because it's easy to read a headline about "tighter SIPP rules" and assume every pension in Britain is suddenly under scrutiny. It isn't. The FCA's own supervisory work, cited as the basis for CP26/20, points at a specific failure pattern: operators accepting introductions from unregulated advisers, waving through investments nobody at the firm had properly assessed, and in some cases losing track of exactly what a scheme held once the paperwork moved between an unauthorised trustee and the operator itself. That's a structural problem with a subset of the market, not a verdict on SIPPs as a wrapper. A well-run SIPP holding a Vanguard global tracker and an investment trust or two is not the product the FCA is worried about, whatever the headlines around "pension shake-up" might suggest.
What to actually do with your SIPP now
Don't wait for a policy statement that's eighteen months away to find out whether your provider is one of the ones the FCA is worried about. Ask your SIPP operator directly for its current due diligence policy on new investments — a provider that can't produce one in writing, or that answers vaguely, is telling you something. And if your SIPP holds anything exotic — unlisted shares, structured notes, overseas property, anything you can't easily value on a Tuesday afternoon by checking a price on your platform's app — get a written explanation of how that specific asset is safeguarded and who the underlying custodian or trustee actually is.
- Check whether your SIPP operator is FCA-authorised in its own right, or whether it relies on an unauthorised trustee structure — the second is exactly what the new PSM&A regime targets.
- If you're consolidating old pensions into a SIPP this year, favour a platform with a long, boring track record over one advertising unusually wide investment choice; wide choice is often where due diligence gets thin.
- Keep your own paper trail — contract notes, valuation statements, correspondence about any non-standard holding — because the FCA's findings suggest not every operator keeps one for you.
Reeves's Treasury has spent the past two years tightening the tax treatment around pensions; the FCA is now doing the operational equivalent on the regulatory side. Neither change happens because of one bad headline — they happen because supervisors kept finding the same gaps, scheme after scheme, until a consultation became the only sensible next step. Submissions on CP26/20 close on 24 August 2026, and while ordinary SIPP holders aren't the ones the FCA expects to respond to a Handbook consultation, the firms that do respond are effectively negotiating the rules your pension will run under from 2027 onwards — which is as good a reason as any to know, before that date, exactly what your own provider is holding and why.