The shortlist: Who has made the greatest contribution to pensions over the past 20 years?

Tonight, Professional Pensions is holding the 20th anniversary UK Pensions Awards.

As part of these awards, we are presenting a special accolade - the Greatest Single Contribution to Occupational Pensions 1998-2017 - to recognise the individual who has done the most to advance the cause of occupational pensions over the past two decades.

The process for this award began earlier this year when the PP editorial team began gathering nominations for the accolade from trustees, scheme managers and people from around the industry.

A longlist of nominations was then published and we conducted an industry-wide poll to decide on a shortlist - receiving hundreds of votes from people across pensions.

The votes have been counted and the final shortlist is as follows:

Alan Pickering

Pickering is the current chairman of BESTrustees, and is a trustee of the Plumbing Industry Pension Scheme and The People's Pension. He is a former chairman of the National Association of Pension Funds. He authored the Pickering Report, which laid the groundwork for the Pensions Act 2004.

Steve Webb

Sir Steve is a Liberal Democrat who served as pensions minister from 2010 to 2015 under the coalition government. During that time, he oversaw the introduction of the state pension triple lock and auto-enrolment. He is now director of policy at Royal London, and received a knighthood for political and public service in 2017.

Andrew Young

Young joined The Pensions Regulator as an actuary in 2009 after retiring from the Government Actuary's Department (GAD), where he worked from 1972 on a number of social security and policy issues in the UK and internationally. During his career he also advised the DWP on changes to state pensions in the late 1990s; helped design a new scheme funding regime to replace the Minimum Funding Requirement (MFR); and was one of the key architects of the Pension Protection Fund. Young is a council member of the Pensions Policy Institute and is a past chairman of the International Actuarial Association.