SCA U.K. Pension Plan

SCA U.K. Pension Plan

The SCA U.K. Pension Plan was established in 1996 to provide retirement benefits for employees of the SCA group's U.K. operations, now part of the hygiene-and-health company Essity. Carol Woodley serves as Chair and Independent Trustee Director, overseeing a scheme that has moved decisively from accumulation to insurance-backed settlement. Legal & General Assurance Society Limited completed the £1.1 billion buy-in, securing benefits for roughly 5,900 retirees and 3,600 deferred members. The Plan's only publicly disclosed asset is a bulk-annuity buy-in policy covering its U.K. obligations. No public record details its remaining liquid portfolio, though the buy-in transaction itself signals a preference for transferring longevity, inflation, and interest-rate risk to a regulated insurer rather than managing those exposures internally. The trustee board's investment decisions are shaped by this all-in de-risking posture. Before the buy-in, the Plan likely held a conventional liability-driven mix of gilts, credit, and a small allocation to growth assets — a footprint now largely collapsed into the single insurer policy. Governance sits with a trustee board chaired by Woodley, operating on behalf of Essity Holding UK Limited as the sponsoring employer. The Plan is a signatory to the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change and follows the Net Zero Investment Framework. In recent years the primary operational event has been the buy-in execution itself, which effectively caps the Plan's active investing lifecycle. Where most U.K. pension schemes still sit mid-journey — hedging liabilities while running growth portfolios — the SCA U.K. Pension Plan is among the cohort that has gone terminal. Its structural differentiator is the completed buy-in, leaving the trustee board focused on insurer covenant monitoring and residual governance rather than asset allocation.