Only four weeks after the consultation [PDF] closed, a short set of amendments to winding-up legislation has been laid this week (SI 2007/1930) and will come into force as planned on 1 October 2007. Only one minor and necessary technical change has been made to the draft regs. A formal Government response [PDF] has been posted on the DWP website.

As we noted in our previous article, the amendments have a history, stemming from an earlier consultation which resulted in a report from the Secretary of State in November 2006, “Speeding up winding up of occupational pension schemes [PDF]”, which we discussed here at the time.

The new regs:

• (a) enable trustees to discharge small accrued pension entitlements (including pension credit members whose employer contributes to the scheme) by way of winding up lump sum payments, even if members did not have a right to the lump sum under the scheme rules. This will reduce the administrative costs to schemes; and
• (b) require schemes which started to wind up after 1 October 2007 to submit their first report to the Pensions Regulator (TPR) after two years after they start winding up, instead of the current three years.