Changes to Survivor Benefits

Following two court cases, changes have been made to survivor benefits ensuring greater equality across all relationships. 

These changes impact the pension payable to:

  • Surviving same-sex civil partners
  • Survivors of same sex marriages
  • Male survivors of opposite sex marriages.

Essentially the change now takes into account membership that was previously not used when calculating a survivor’s pension. This change ensures these individuals are treated similarly to female survivors of opposite sex marriages.

Generally, this change means that should a member die, we will now include the following membership when calculating the survivor’s pensions:

  • where the marriage / civil partnership takes place after the member leaves the pension scheme, we will use membership the member built up on or after 6 April 1978 to calculate the survivor pension
  • where the marriage / civil partnership takes place before the member leaves the pension scheme, we will also use membership the member built up before 6 April 1978

The changes apply to deaths on or after 5 December 2005.

The Fund will contact all affected members to outline in more detail how the changes impact them.

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