2nd September 2020
The Department of Finance is consulting on options to address discrimination identified by the courts in the transitional arrangements which were part of the 2015 reform of all public service pension schemes.
This consultation impacts on the majority of teachers and it is therefore very important that your views are heard.
If an NI Teachers’ Pension scheme member was ‘in service’ on the 31 March 2012 and still in service on 1 April 2015 then the consultation will apply. The consultation provides an opportunity to provide feedback on the proposals.
The two possible approaches are:
- an immediate choice;
- a deferred choice.
Both approaches would give members a choice whether to receive benefits from the legacy or reformed pension schemes in respect of their service during the period between 1 April 2015 and 31 March 2022.
INTO will be responding collectively to the consultation and would encourage INTO members to wait for the INTO response before responding to the consultation individually.
The consultation will run for 12 weeks and closes at midnight on 18 November 2020.
Members will receive notification of the INTO response to the consultation when it is available on the INTO website. Please check your emails and the INTO website, www.into.ie/ni for updates.
The consultation document itself is a big document of 65 pages but there is a Public Service Pensions Leaflet which sets out a summary of the proposals. These can both be found here:
The government is seeking to address discrimination caused by the ‘transitional protection arrangements’ when career average pension schemes were introduced in 2015.
This applies to all the main public service pension schemes, including the NI Teachers’ Pension Scheme.
Transitional protection is the policy which allowed some older scheme members to stay in the unreformed pension schemes instead of moving to the new career average pension schemes.
The recent court ruling that transitional protection gave rise to unlawful discrimination against younger scheme members has become known as the McCloud Judgment.
The ‘McCloud and Sargent’ cases concern the transitional protections given to members of the Firefighters and Judges pension schemes, who in 2012 were within 10 years of their normal retirement age, as part of public service pensions reform.
These protections were challenged at an employment tribunal where they were deemed to be unlawful on grounds of age discrimination.
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/lord-chancellor-v-mcloud-and-ors-judgment.pdf
In short, the judgement found that when the public sector pension schemes were changed in 2015 (as a result of the Hutton Report) the manner in which the transitional provisions in schemes have been implemented has given rise to unlawful direct age discrimination.
As a result, the Deparment of Finance is now consulting on how this discrimination can be addressed in all NI public sector pension schemes – including the NITPS.
INTO advice today is that members hold off responding to the consultation until we are able to provide a more detailed response and guidance to members.
Gerry Murphy
INTO Northern Secretary