On the go: The chair of the Local Government Pension Scheme Advisory Board, councillor Roger Phillips, has written to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities asking for reforms to discriminatory death and survivor benefits in the LGPS, and to protect the scheme against future legal challenges.
In his letter to Paul Scully MP, minister of state at the DLUHC, sent on August 26, Phillips urged him to make changes to the scheme that reflect recent court judgments and an “evolving” understanding of the Equalities Act 2010.
The SAB met in June to discuss the potential for age discrimination arising from existing regulations, which impose an age restriction of 75 on the payment of death grants.
“In setting this upper age limit, we believe that the LGPS is not only at risk of legal challenge, but also out of step with other public service pension schemes, which have already removed this upper age limit,” Phillips wrote, adding that the board formally recommended that “this potential discrimination be removed from the scheme”.
He further pointed out that the SAB is still waiting for the government to make good on its promise to consult on amendments to survivor benefits in line with the Goodwin case.
Speaking for the government in a written statement to parliament on July 20, Steve Barclay MP, chief secretary to the Treasury, said that the relevant departments would consult “and take forward changes as soon as possible”, but the DLUHC has yet to publish its own consultation.
The Goodwin case arose as a result of sex and sexual orientation discrimination, which saw survivors of both opposite-sex marriages and civil partnerships treated less favourably than survivors in same-sex marriages and civil partnerships.
In its 2021 budget, the Treasury estimated that the cost of the remedy would be around £3bn over the next 40 years, and the government pledged £425mn over the next six years to cover payments to members backdated to the introduction of of same-sex civil partnerships in 2005.
In his letter, Phillips said the SAB had previously recommended that “the government should investigate the feasibility [of] removing all remaining differences in benefits in relation to survivor benefits, potentially with those changes only affecting survivor benefits brought into payment from a time to be agreed (rather than all previous and existing recipients of survivor benefits)”.
“This would help ‘future proof’ the schemes against expensive and resource-consuming legal challenges, which chip away at the remaining inconsistencies in benefits,” he said.
Phillips asked that the DLUHC considers commissioning the Government Actuary’s Department to undertake “appropriate analysis” in order to “identify those elements of the scheme where differences in benefits arise and the cost of removing those provisions over a number of different time periods”.
“Evidence-based decisions could then be taken which balance the legal risks, the costs and the fairness of where those costs should fall. I would be grateful if you could give this proposal fresh consideration,” he wrote.
