Please look out for an email from us soon notifying you that your Annual Benefit Statement is ready to view. We will be contacting all active scheme members who have supplied us with an email address by 31 August 2020.
Your Annual Benefit Statement provides you with a forecast of pension benefits payable at your normal retirement age. Keeping an eye on your pension is a key part of planning for retirement and will help you to make decisions around topping up.
Your Pension Newsletter will be available during July also and a copy will be published within your My Pension Online account.
If you are not registered for My Pension Online and you have not opted out of electronic communications then you will not have access to your Annual Benefit Statement. Please register now by visting https://www.yourpensionservice.org.uk/my-pension-online/
Please note that this year’s Annual Benefit Statement provides an estimate of your pension benefits accrued in your current scheme membership to 31/03/2020. Any projections on your pension entitlement are also based on the assumption that your current membership will continue until your normal pension age.
Please also note that on the 20 December 2018, the Court of Appeal ruled in McCloud/Sargeant that the transitional arrangements introduced as part of the 2015 reforms to the Firefighters’ and Judges’ pension scheme were discriminatory and, therefore, unlawful. The Government subsequently accepted that this ruling applied to all the main public service pension schemes and is currently working on removing this discrimination to all affected scheme members. This work is complex and will take time.
For further information please see the Written Ministerial Statement from 25 March 2020: https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-statement/Commons/2020-03-25/HCWS187/
At this stage there is still uncertainty around the final approach to removing this discrimination. This means that it has not been possible to reflect the impact of the Court of Appeal ruling in this year’s Annual Benefit Statements.
