Funds responsible for the pensions of 12.5 million people in the UK are to be tapped to help to meet pension promises made to staff at Lehman Brothers in Britain, The Times has learnt.

The trustees of the pension scheme have taken the first step in applying for a bailout from the Pension Protection Fund (PPF), the industry-wide lifeboat fund that is bankrolled by all traditional final-salary schemes.

It comes as PwC demanded the return of more than $8 billion (£4.4 billion) which had been transferred to the investment bank’s American holding company before its demise.

Many of Lehman’s employees in London are said to have been miffed that the bank’s European operations had no cash when the parent company was forced into administration Monday.

Tony Lomas, the PwC partner running the administration who made the written request that the $8 billion be repatriated, said that the transfer was not suspicious but that further inquiry was needed because of the size of the sum involved.

The £180 million Lehman pension scheme was in deficit when the investment bank went bankrupt last weekend, meaning that the assets were believed to be insufficient to meet the future liabilities. The PPF is designed to meet pension promises when sponsoring employers go bust with insufficient assets in their pension plans. It is funded by a levy on all British final-salary pension plans. This varies according to the size of claims. A PPF spokesman confirmed that it had received a Section 120 notice from the trustees on Thursday evening. This is the first step that pension fund trustees have to take when seeking help.

The Lehman Brothers pension scheme has 4,000 members, including 1,500 who until recently were working at Lehman. There are also 2,400 deferred members, former staff who retain pension entitlements, and 120 pensioners. The scheme is thought to have closed to new members in 1999.

About 7,800 UK defined-benefit pension funds pay £675 million a year in levies to finance the PPF, which then runs the orphaned pension funds. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the administrators to Lehman Brothers in the UK, confirmed that the pension fund was in deficit. It could not immediately quantify the deficit.

There are concerns that British pension funds could also be hurt more directly by the Lehman failure. Some are thought to have used Lehman as a counterparty to derivative contracts designed to hedge them against adverse moves in interest rates and inflation.

Lehman had marketed its expertise in so-called Liability Driven Investment to some funds. The pension fund ranks equally with other unsecured creditors in a winding up.

PwC also revealed yesterday that it had identified $15 billion of property assets within one holding company inside the Lehman empire. Lehman Brothers UK Real Estate Holdings controlled more than 200 entities or joint ventures, including investment properties and developments in Britain, Sweden, France, Finland, Spain and Croatia.

It also owned a portfolio of loans on which borrowers had defaulted, as well as shares.

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