Lloyds ‘has lost £10bn’ from staff pension pot

Lloyds’ retirement scheme may have lost £10billion of its value in the September meltdown – prompting calls for the bank to reveal more details about the state of the fund. 

The pension plan, one of the biggest in the UK, was forced to sell ‘a large proportion of its equity holdings’ to meet urgent cash calls after former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-Budget. 

Details of Lloyds’ fire sale – linked to the use of liability driven investment – were revealed in remarkable evidence to MPs by Henry Tapper, a pensions expert who is also the partner of Stella Eastwood, head of group pensions at Lloyds. 

Meltdown: Pensions expert John Ralfe said Lloyds should make a formal statement to reassure scheme members

Without naming her, Tapper told MPs that he lived with ‘the CEO of a large DB (defined benefit) plan which needed to liquidate a large proportion of its equity holdings’. 

He added that the ‘scale of the collateral call ran into billions’. 

Mark Brown, head of the BTU trade union, has now written to the Lloyds pension scheme trustees urging ‘a robust investigation’ into Eastwood. 

Staff are ‘routinely disciplined for much less’, Brown said, adding the leak was ‘a clear breach of confidentiality’. 

Pensions expert John Ralfe said Lloyds should make a formal statement to reassure scheme members. Lloyds said the sell-off had ‘no material impact’ on the scheme’s funding position. But analysts say Lloyds’ £52billion scheme, with 345,000 members, could have lost a fifth of its asset value. 

The bank declined to comment on Eastwood’s position and said an update on the scheme would be given in February.