United Kingdom

UK - Scheme members could still lose all their retirement savings even when the Pension Protection Fund is introduced, the pensions advisory service warns.

UK - Members of the Railways Pensions Scheme face a contribution hike of up to eight percentage points a year because of burgeoning deficits.

UK - Pensions minister Malcolm Wicks will give an insight into the pensions White Paper at the Pensions Management Institute spring conference on March 11.

UK - Avon Pension Fund has appointed ABN AMRO Mellon Global Securities Services as global custodian of its segregated assets worth £1.3bn.

UK - Female IFAs are unhappy about the level of technical advice being given in the financial industry, new research shows.

UK - Pension funds have failed to beat returns generated by the FTSE All-Share for 2003, provisional figures from Russell/Mellon CAPS reveal.

UK - AON Consulting has appointed Robert Middleton (pictured) as managing director of its consulting business in a bid to strengthen its client services and overall growth.

UK - The £1.2bn Pilkington Superannuation Scheme has closed its in-house investment department.

UK - Trustees trying to reach "Bradstock agreements" with their struggling scheme sponsors are playing a high stakes poker game which could backfire, lawyers claim.

UK - A loophole in the proposed simplified tax regime will give people extra cash simply by moving some of their pension from one plan to another.