Government to review second miners pension scheme
Tens of thousands of former miners could benefit after the government announced it would review a controversial pension scheme.
The chancellor used last month’s Budget to scrap 30-year-old arrangement The government receives hundreds of millions of pounds each year from the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme (MPS).
The first installment of the £1.5bn Rachel Reeves has pledged to repay will be paid on Friday.
The government has now confirmed it will consider a second miners pension after a former mine manager from the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme (BCSSS) questioned the exclusion of miners from the new benefits.
Earlier this month, Dave Cradduck, who has worked at Haig Pitt in Whitehaven, Cumbria for 20 years, told the BBC that “not a penny” would be returned to BCSS staff , which is “unfair”.
He said the government had taken £4.8bn out of the MPS fund and £3.2bn out of the BCSS, so people in the scheme were also owed money.
At the time, a Department of Energy spokesman gave no indication of any future changes and said the government “must consider both plans separately”.
But the department has now announced it will “review any proposals put forward by the trustees of the British Coal Employees Pension Scheme”.
Last week, trustees asked ministers to return £2.3bn of investment reserves to members of the scheme.
Both schemes were taken over by the government when British Coal was privatized in 1994.
The agreements were struck between the then Conservative government and the scheme’s trustees in exchange for government guarantees that the value of miners’ pensions would not be reduced.
The recent reversal of MPS arrangements will see the pensions of 112,000 former miners increase by a third.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said it “marks the end of a decades-long injustice that has prevented thousands of people across the country from receiving the decent pensions they undeniably deserve”.
