Dear Brother/Sister,
On 4 September 2012 the Home Secretary, Theresa May, announced the Government's final decision on the new police pension scheme in a ministerial statement that was distributed as part of circular 2012HOC0489MW.
This circular also outlined the main differences between this proposal for the police and the Firefighters' Pension Scheme: proposed final agreement which we received in May 2012.
Although the police negotiations have been conducted independently to ours, members will recognise the similarities in the schemes and I am sure they will have been looking at these proposals with interest.
While the current proposals are similar, there are some subtle differences which were highlighted in the earlier circular.
For example, the Police Pension Scheme proposal has a different accrual rate, a different revaluation rate and a flexible retirement age of 55 with actuarial reductions from the Normal Pension Age of 60. In addition to this there are differences in the protection arrangements.
For your ease I have attached a simple comparison table which gives details of the current similarities and the differences between these proposals. This may assist when you are discussing this with members. For your information, during a meeting I had with CLG yesterday on a separate pension issue, I took the opportunity to reiterate the FBU's position that the proposed final agreement was unacceptable and to informally raise specifically our recognition that the improvements contained in the proposed police pension position around the transitional protection and flexible retirement would need to be discussed further with us at the appropriate time.
Whilst it is extremely important that we recognise all the proposals for other public service pensions we are focusing on the job at hand, which is preparing information for the Normal Pension Age review which is due to report by the end of December 2012.
Yours in Unity,
Sean Starbuck
National Officer
2012HOC0504SS
Circular ref
2012HOC0504SS
