Following the death of Robert Maxwell, it became clear that he had embezzled a large amount of money from the pension fund of Mirror Group Newspapers.

The Myners Report identified three problems with the MFR: The Pensions Act 2004 replaced the MFR from September 2005 with a new scheme-specific "statutory funding objective" (SFO), allowing more flexibility to individual schemes' circumstances whilst at the same time protecting members' benefits.

Liu and Tonks (2012)[2] examine the effect of a company's pension commitments on its dividend and investment policies, assessing the impact of funding rules under the MFR, and also under the funding requirements introduced under the Pensions Act 2004.

They find a strong negative relationship between a firm's dividend payments and its pension contributions, but a weaker effect on investments.

A significant change was the phasing in of equalisation of state pension ages for men and women over a ten-year period.