For those of us who have been contributing to AVCs for some time, you will recall that as EL got into their well publicised problems, our contributions were moved to an AVC fund offered by Friends Prov.
You may also have noticed that FP have applied an MVR to their fund for all early withdrawals, including early retirement. This appears to me to mean that an individual, upon early retirement, may not even get back the funds he has paid in!
However, there are options to pay AVCs into L&G (various funds may be selected) and that there is NOT currently a MVR for early retirement applied to the L&G funds.