The Council of the Institute decided that ‘a Working Party be set up to advise the Council on the actuarial and other problems arising in connexion with the transferability of pension rights’. The Council of the Faculty accepted the Institute's invitation to be associated with the project and we were appointed to be the members of the Working Party.

2. In considering the subject remitted to us, we quickly formed the view that the description preservation of pension rights is more apt than transferability of pension rights, for the transfer of pension rights from one scheme to another when a member changes his employment is only one of several methods of preserving the whole or part of his accrued pension rights. We have accordingly used the term preservation in preference to transferability throughout this report.

3. We have confined our attention to the question of preservation of pension rights as it concerns individual members of pension schemes who change their employment, as distinct from the problem that arises when groups of members are transferred with the work they do from one employment to another, as they were, for example, on a large scale when the nationalized industries were set up; in such cases other problems arise.

This paper stems from a suggestion that it would be worth while to bring to the notice of the profession the progress which has been made and the statistical problems that have arisen in the study of epidemiology in its wider sense, viz. the study, not merely of the spread of communicable disease as was formerly implied by this term, but of the natural history of disease; its prevalence, causation, symptomology and prognosis. It would, however, require a series of papers to cover so wide a field and would demand medical as well as statistical competence. It therefore seemed advisable to use the more restrictive title chosen in order to emphasize the fact that, in the main, consideration is devoted to statistical rather than to clinical aspects.