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.
