More member benefit increases after ECJ ruling

In April, we confirmed that we had started to pay increased benefits to PPF and FAS pensioners who were most affected by the Court of Justice of the European Union’s (ECJ’s) ruling because they had had their benefits adjusted by the Long Service Cap.

We’ve been working hard over the summer to assess the group of pensioners who have had their benefits adjusted by the compensation cap. We’ve now started to make increased payments to the first group of pensioners whose benefits were reduced to below 50% of the value of their accrued pension (as a result of just the cap being applied). 

A second group of affected capped pensioners will start to see their payments increase in the next few weeks (PPF and FAS members receive their payments at different points in the month).

Paying arrears

Although we’ll continue to process these increases, we won’t yet pay arrears (including tax-free cash) on these increases because there are ongoing court proceedings about the way we’re calculating increases. We believe it would be wrong to risk having to recover over payments if the court decides that we must take a different approach. We don’t yet know when the court hearing will take place. 

What's happening next

We continue to work on our approach for assessing the remaining members who may have been affected by the ruling. This includes pensioners for whom the effect of the cap alone did not take them below the 50% minimum, but when this was combined with other factors, did fall below the threshold. Other factors may include:

• If the annual increases a member would have received under their original scheme would have been significantly more than the annual increases which apply under the PPF
• Differences between the original scheme’s benefit structure and the PPF benefit structure, eg spouse’s benefits

We’ll confirm our approach for this group of members in due course.

Read our FAQs to find out more about what the ECJ ruling means for you.