The Honda Group UK Pension Scheme has completed an £800m buy-in with Legal & General (L&G) Assurance Society Limited, securing the retirement benefits of over 1,700 retirees and over 3,000 deferred members.

The scheme trustees and the sponsor were jointly advised by EY. The trustees also received investment advice from Mercer, while Hymans Robertson acted as section 36 advisers, and XPS as the scheme actuary. The sponsor received investment advice from Isio.

In addition to this, Burges Salmon provided legal advice to the trustee, while Sackers provided legal advice to the sponsor and CMS provided legal advice to L&G.

The scheme, which is a longstanding client of L&G’s Asset Management business, was able to secure a price lock during the transaction, ensuring price certainty while the terms were finalised and "significantly" reducing the scheme's exposure to recent market volatility.

The scheme paid the premium through a combination of an in-specie asset transfer and cash, with L&G also providing a partial, flexible deferred premium solution to support the run-off of the scheme’s illiquid asset holdings over the coming years.

This solution was designed to enable the scheme to defer a significant proportion of a transaction’s total premium, providing greater optionality during a transaction process.

The scheme's trustees said that L&G’s in-house administrative and customer care offering was "integral" to the proposition, particularly the provision of member option factors to the scheme during the buy-in period to support continued use of the scheme’s online benefit modeller.

“The security of our members’ benefits has been our highest priority, so this transaction marks an outstanding outcome for all involved," trustee chair, Ray Runza, said.

"The trustee board is delighted to see a successful outcome after a rigorous selection process across market insurers and months of dedicated preparation, and effort by all advisors.

"I’d like to thank our advisors for their collaborative work to get the scheme to this point and look forward to working with L&G for their continued support to our members.”

Adding to this, L&G Institutional Retirement CEO, Andrew Kail, said: “This is another example of L&G’s ability to deliver for trustees, sponsors and members in all market environments.

"We are delighted to have helped the scheme secure its members’ retirement benefits. What really differentiates our proposition is our ability to offer schemes a multi-award-winning customer service offering as well as bespoke transaction structuring that caters to individual schemes’ practical needs.”

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