UK- The Coors Brewers Pension Plan, the former UK pension scheme of brewing giant Bass, has outsourced its administration to Paymaster.

Paymaster, the wholly owned pensions processing and administration subsidiary of UK employee services company Hogg Robinson, has a five year contract beginning in April 2002.

The Bass plan, which was reconstituted as a new “mirror” scheme in 2000 after Bass sold its brewing interests to the Belgian brewing giant Interbrew.

In February this year the Adolph Coors Company, the US’s third largest brewer, bought a large part of the Bass Brewers business, together with its pension plan, from Interbrew for £1.2 bn. The business includes the Carling, Grolsch, Worthington, and Caffrey's beer brands.

David Yorke, director of reward and pensions at Coors Brewers Limited, said: “we previously handled our pensions administration in-house with Six Continents [the name Bass chose for itself after it sold its brewing_interests] but the sale of the business encouraged us to look for an outsourced solution.”

“We could have continued to handle it in-house, because we have been used to the resources of an internal pensions department. But when we looked at the economies of scale you get with outsourcing, and the fact that there wasn’t the expertise we needed in the Burton-on-Trent area, we decided it was more appropriate to lock into a professional operation.”

The Coors Brewers pension plan has approximately 20,000 members, with 4,000 active members, 4,500 deferred pensioners and 10,000 pensioners. Coors acquired only the England and Wales operation of Bass Brewers. Seven hundred active members in Scotland and Ireland are being transferred to Interbrew UK pension plan.