Council pension

ET22

I worked in the council for 5 years until mid 2015. If i return to the same council. Does anyone know how it affects my original pension?I.E what scheme it would fall under and actually how do council pensions work because i have no idea , thankyou in advance     

Brie

Guessing here but I would assume that your old pension would remain as deferred and you would have a separate new pension.  Almost all work pensions have changed over the last 10 - 20 years and I doubt the LGPS is any different in that.  That said I do believe that it is still a defined benefit scheme but perhaps at a lower accrual rate and later retirement age.

hyubh

ET22 said:

I worked in the council for 5 years until mid 2015. If i return to the same council. Does anyone know how it affects my original pension?I.E what scheme it would fall under and actually how do council pensions work because i have no idea , thankyou in advance     

As you left under the CARE scheme previously, the default (if you don't elect otherwise within 12 months of rejoining) is to aggregate service periods (doesn't matter if the old and new employer are the same, or even if the old and new pension fund/administering authority is the same). However, given the gap between leaving and rejoining the scheme will be over 5 years, this aggregation will involve a notional CETV purchasing additional CARE pension against your new period of membership, not your pre-April 2014 service producing final salary benefits again.

If you did rejoin the scheme, best request an estimate of what CARE pension the notional transfer of your deferred pension will get you, then decide after that. Left separate, it will continue to revalue/increase by CPI. CARE pension while an active member in the LGPS also revalues by CPI, though technically there is a slight difference in that deferred pensions will never decrease when there's deflation, whereas negative CARE revaluation is possible. That said, the main difference is that transferred, all your LGPS pension will have a normal pension age of your state pension age, whereas if the previous period is left deferred, the pre-April 2014 part will keep a normal pension age of 65. If transferred, the amount of CARE pension purchased would be larger however to make up for the fact.

hyubh

Brie said:

Guessing here but I would assume that your old pension would remain as deferred and you would have a separate new pension.  Almost all work pensions have changed over the last 10 - 20 years and I doubt the LGPS is any different in that.  That said I do believe that it is still a defined benefit scheme but perhaps at a lower accrual rate and later retirement age.

There have been no material benefit structure changes in the LGPS between 2015 when the OP left to now. And the major one before then, in 2014, involved a sharply increased accrual rate (along with CARE for final salary and a mostly later normal pension age)... 

ET22

Thankyou all for your advice x