On the go: The government has announced a new bill intended to push ahead with the implementation of the McCloud remedy.
The public service pension and judicial offices bill, announced in the Queen’s Speech on Tuesday, will formally afford eligible members the right to choose which set of benefits they wish to receive for the “remedy period” between April 2015 and March 2022.
All members will be moved to the reformed pension schemes by March 2022, “ensuring equal treatment from that point on”.
The bill also contains specific provisions for members of the Judicial Pension Schemes and Local Government Pension Schemes “to reflect their different arrangements”.
The general purpose of the bill is to ensure “public service pensions continue to reward public servants for their dedicated service, while being fairer — especially for lower earners — and more affordable to the taxpayer”.
The goal behind the provisions for the judiciary is to support “recruitment and retention in the judiciary and [to ensure] our judiciary can continue to meet the demands of the justice system, by reforming their pension arrangements and increasing the judicial mandatory retirement age”.
It is also aimed at “increasing flexibility to tackle recruitment and retention issues in the judiciary by putting allowances on a firmer legal footing”.
Members of the judiciary will be moved into a reformed pension scheme “owing to the judges’ unique circumstances of appointments”, while the mandatory retirement age of judicial office holders will be raised from 70 to 75, and the power to set judicial allowances will be placed “on firmer legal footing”.
The bill makes no mention of specific provisions for members of the police and firefighters’ pension schemes.
Pensions Expert has reported a number of times on complaints by members of these schemes that the McCloud remedy, as currently devised, removes protected pension rights and introduces new types of age and sex discrimination.
The government estimates that the cost of providing additional pension benefits during the remedy period will be £17bn, but this excludes administration costs.
This equates to £2.5bn a year every year for the duration of the remedy period, based on 2016 valuation data, or four per cent of the £400bn it is estimated the public sector pension reforms will save over the 50 years following their introduction.
