The amount of defined benefit and hybrid schemes and their memberships continued to decline in 2018/19, with the number of active members falling by 168,000 year-on-year.

In The Pensions Regulator's (TPR) latest annual The DB landscape report, it revealed that the number of active DB and hybrid scheme members in the UK fell from 1.23 million to 1.06 million between 31 March 2018 and 31 March 2019.

Furthermore, the proportion of DB schemes that were open fell from 14 per cent to 13 per cent, while those closed to future accrual increase from 40 per cent to 43 per cent.

TPR also found that 52 per cent of DB and hybrid members are in schemes that are closed to new members.

The private sector had fewer active memberships, with 10 per cent compared to 37 per cent of those in public service schemes.

TPR's report noted that there were 198 DB and hybrid schemes winding up in March 2019, with 771 still open.

The total funding status of all open and closed to future accrual or new members DB and hybrid schemes was a deficit of £159bn.

Overall, they had assets of £1,700bn and liabilities of £1,860bn, the report revealed.

On the coverage of funding figures, the report stated: “Not all schemes had rolled forward valuation data available at the date where the data was taken.

“Schemes in wind up are not processed in this way, for example, and there may be instances where a scheme is not liable to prepare part three valuations or where certain items of data used in the calculation were not available.

“The data set used in this document has rolled forward funding information for 96 per cent of the memberships.”

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