More than half of all employers surveyed at the start of this year were considering closing their final salary pension schemes to existing members, effectively freezing retirement benefits at today’s levels, according to Hewitt Associates.

Hewitt, one of the UK’s largest benefits practices, is to release the study next week, just days after a string of the nation’s largest employers announced that they were curtailing their final salary plans. This has prompted forecasts that many, if not most, of their peers could follow.