The UK’s largest retail park fund, the £1.5bn Hercules unit trust run by British Land and Schroders, has secured vital funding from one of the largest North American pension funds to help pay bondholders in a restructuring of a £800m debt facility.

The attempt to restructure Hercules is an important market test case of the ability to renegotiate the billions of pounds of securitised debt due for repayment in the next few years, or face the alternative of default owing to breaches of loan-to-value covenants.