UK – Appliance manufacturer HooverCandy Group has appointed Aon Consulting to provide actuarial services to a further three of its pension schemes.

Aon has advised the 350 million-pound (522.7 million-euros) Hoover scheme since 1997. It now adds the Hoover Supplementary Retirement Benefits Scheme, the Candy Holdings Ltd. Pension Scheme and the Kelco Pension Scheme. The funds are worth a 19 million pounds combined.

Mercer and Hazell Carr were the incumbents at the schemes.

“We were selected on the back of the work we have done for the HooverCandy Group,” said Aon client manager David Eteen. “Over that time we have worked extremely well with the Group’s in-house team and have demonstrated our ability to meet the client’s needs effectively.”

Barry Hawkins, pensions manager for HooverCandy, said: ”As a group we have consolidated and in the past we had offices and factories all around the country. Some of those are now closed down.”

“We rationalised and thought we needed to have our advisors in one place as well and we needed to have one set of advisors rather than four sets.”

He added that cost-cutting had been one of the reasons for the decision together with the practicality of having one consultant for the four schemes.

“We wanted to consolidate our pension scheme advisers with the organisation that provided us with expert actuarial and consulting services at a reasonable cost.”

He added: “We believe that Aon Consulting’s approach to actuarial and consulting services suits our business.”