Blogs & News

Surprising revelations to note for the passive investment community

Pension scheme members are missing out on GBP20bn of unclaimed pension pots

Retirement without adequate income is not a happy place to be

BBC agree to new payment plan to try and bridge pension deficits

The BBC will make annual contributions until 2028 to reverse the current £1.8bn deficit of its defined benefit pension scheme.

The television network as agreed to a new repayment plan, which will imply paying £2.37bn over the next 11 years.

Next year alone, BBC will pay £340m, according to the company’s annual report.

The new repayment plan is the result of a triennial actuarial valuation, completed in June 2017.

UK university pension deficits more than double since 2014

The deficit of the pension scheme funding the retirements of UK university staff has more than doubled in three years, and now a prominent MP is asking why.

The Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) provides pensions for academics and has 390,000 members across 350 universities in the UK.

The annual accounts of the USS, showed the pension fund’s deficit had widened from £5.3bn in 2014, to £12.6bn this year. This is the largest recorded deficit of any UK retirement fund.

Pension assets become battleground in divorce cases

Court orders to split a couple's pensions in the case of a divorce are on the rise, with lawyers seeing a 43 per cent increase in the last year.

Rising asset values make it increasingly attractive for divorcees to seek a share of their spouse’s pension, according to law firm Collyer Bristow.

The number of pension sharing orders, which are issued by courts to divide a pension following a divorce, rose to 11,503, up from 8,027 in 2015/16 - This is despite a 3 per cent fall in divorces in the UK.

1 in 12 pensioners delaying retirement due to lack of funds

More than half of those planning to retire this year will consider working past the state pension age, with many saying they can not afford to stop work, research from Prudential has suggested.

The group’s annual research found that ‘pretirement’, where people gradually scale back work or change jobs rather than stop working completely, is increasingly common among people of retirement age.

About one in 12 people said they were delaying retirement because they could not afford it, and thought they would not be able to stop working before the age of 70.

Gay man wins equal pension rights in landmark UK court case

The UK Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex couples have the same rights to pension death benefits as heterosexual couples in a landmark case involving a final salary scheme.

On Wednesday, John Walker won his long-running legal battle to allow his husband to inherit the same percentage of his defined benefit (DB) pension that a female partner would be entitled to.

Under existing rules, occupational pension schemes pay out 50% of the value of a pension to a spouse for the rest of their lives after their husband or wife dies - without taking the marriage date into account.

However, an exemption in the 2010 Equality Act allows companies to limit pension benefits for surviving same sex spouses, to benefits accrued since 2005, when the Civil Partnership Act came in.

This means that companies do not have to pay out the full pension benefits to a civil partner in a same sex marriage on pensions built up before 2005.