Leigh Holmes
Leigh advises on a wide range of pensions issues. She has extensive experience of working with trustees and pension scheme employers through proposals to amend, close, wind-up and merge their schemes.
Recent experience includes:
- Leading the advice team on a £90m buy-in (ready for conversion to buy-out) leading to the scheme's early exit from a Pension Protection Fund assessment period.
- Advising a group holding company in the context of a sale of an overseas division including negotiating guarantee terms with the trustees of two pension schemes to mitigate the impact of the sale and associated dividend payments.
- Advising in relation to allocation of assets on wind-up following exit from an assessment period and within a buy-in contract environment.
- Leigh is a director of Wrigleys Pensions Trustees Limited, a subsidiary company of the firm which is available to act as a corporate trustee to occupational pension schemes.
- Leigh has spoken at seminars on a range of pensions issues. She presented a paper on ill health pension problems at the annual conference of the Association of Pension Lawyers and has chaired the conference. She addressed the Association of Consulting Actuaries 'current issues in pensions' conference on legal aspects of scheme funding and she has addressed the Charity Law Association conference on pension issues.
Practice Area
Panel
- Contributing Author
Qualified Year
- 1994
Membership
- Former committee member of NE Regional Group of the Pensions Management Institute
- Corporate membership of the National Association of Pension Funds (NE Region)
- Full member of the Association of Pension Lawyers
1 Contributions by Leigh Holmes
PRACTICE NOTES
Winding up UK trust-based DC occupational pension schemes: classification, triggers, expenses, data cleansing, securing benefits, disclosures, trustee protections and completion
This Practice Note sets out the principal steps for properly bringing to an end a defined contribution (DC) occupational pension scheme—also described as a money purchase occupational pension arrangement or a trust-based defined contribution plan. Throughout this Practice Note, this type of arrangement is termed a ‘DC scheme’.
The guidance applies across a range of DC schemes, including trusts that sit outside the authorised master trust framework and small self-administered pension schemes (SSASs), although the latter may, in certain cases, be excluded from particular statutory obligations or requirements.
This Practice Note does not cover the winding-up of any:
an ‘authorised master trust’ under the Pension Schemes Act 2017 (PSA 2017)—for further detailed information, please see Practice Note: The authorisation and supervisory regime for master trusts,
contract-based DC arrangements (eg group personal pension arrangements)—for further details and guidance, see Practice Note: Winding up of personal pension schemes
Statute makes distinct and specific provision for hybrid schemes (combining defined benefit (DB) and DC rights), and these should accordingly be treated as being beyond the ambit of this Practice Note, also together with DC schemes that were contracted-out using the reference scheme test (until 6 April 2016) and those with a...
Pensions
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