The Dynochem UK Pension Scheme has completed a buyout with Pension Insurance Corporation (PIC).

The full insurance buyout covers around 100 members and £15m (€18.2m) of liabilities.

The buyout was required after the sponsor’s private equity owners sold the engineering software provider.

As a condition of the sale, the scheme was required to wind up, transferring its liabilities to the insurance sector.

In other news, the London Borough of Hounslow Pension Scheme has begun a search for investment consulting services.

The fund said it required services and advice on asset allocation, investment strategy, manager selection and the monitoring and reporting of investment managers.

It also requires a named adviser for the life of any contract.

Interested parties should respond to the fund by 7 April.

Elsewhere, Mercer, the global consultancy, has created a global pensions buyout index, focusing on the UK, Ireland and North America.

The index provides benchmarks from 18 third-party insurers and aims to highlight how the cost of insuring defined benefit pensions differs between markets, and changes over time.

While conducting research to create the index, Mercer found insurance costs in the UK were the highest when compared with Canada, Ireland and the US.

The cost of insuring £100m of obligations in the UK would be 23% higher than the accounting liabilities, compared with 17% in Ireland, 8.5% in the US and 5% in Canada.

Finally, The People’s Pension, a defined contribution master trust set up for the rollout of auto-enrolment, has seen its 500,000th member join the scheme.

The member, who joins from a family-owned company operating a chain of public houses, demonstrates the significant growth of the fund since it opened in November 2011.

The pension scheme is run on a not-for-profit basis and is wholly owned by B&CE, the former construction workers pension scheme, set up in 1942.