UNISON General Secretary Dave Prentis today welcomed the deal on pensions for health workers, the civil service and teachers that guarantees lifetime protection for all current employees for their existing pension provision.*
He said:
” We welcome this deal. The Government has honoured its pensions contract with the nation’s health workers. They will have lifetime protection of their existing pensions provision, including their retirement age.
“We will get into talks to negotiate new schemes for new entrants which will be index linked defined benefit schemes, with no central direction over the type of scheme. There will also be provision in those new schemes for people to pay a more into the scheme over a lifetime of work to retire at 60 if they so wish.**
“This is one part of the jigsaw, however, and we want the principles established here to be applied to the local government scheme. These principles have been endorsed by the Cabinet. It is important that the promise made to teachers, health workers and civil servants applies also to the more than 1.3 million local government workers.
“We are confident that the Deputy Prime Minister will want to play fair by the local government workforce.”
Ends
Paragraphs in the deal:
*A principle underlying this agreement is that existing scheme members will have the right to suffer no detriment in terms of their normal pension age and will retain their existing pension provision unless individual or collective agreements within sector specific negotiations are reached which allow changes to those provisions or transition to new schemes.
**