LGPS Deferred pension and reductions

bioboybill wrote: »

Thanks for that. Yes, I am waiting until I'm 60, or at least that's the plan. Another question here. My wife took voluntary severance aged 56 last July. She has deferred taking her LGPS pension. The plan is to leave it as long as possible. Perhaps until she is 62 and would have 85 rule protection. I was wondering how the change in SPA from 60 to 67 would effect her. Would some of her service from 1999 be protected at a SPA of 60? I don't know when the change occurred.

She won't get any of her LGPS pension based on a SPA of 60 - only R85 protections apply. Normal retirement age for women in the LGPS had always been 65 (being the SPA age for women when the scheme was introduced in the 1920s) but back in the heady (and expensive) days of full R85 it wasn't unusual for either sex to retire on unreduced pensions from 60.

Your wife is too young for full R85 protections - like you, they probably only apply to her pre 2008 service. Leaving her pension deferred until she is 62 will lessen the early retirement reductions, but they will still apply to some degree.


P.S. The LGPS didn't follow the reduction in women's SPA from 65 to 60 in the 1940s because the reason for doing so only applied to the State pension - ie, so men could draw the married man's rate of State pension at 65 instead of waiting for their (usually younger) wives to catch up. The change was never meant to pay women's pensions early (remember that back then most married women didn't work after marriage/babies and so didn't accrue their own entitlement to a State pension) - it was just to facilitate payment of the full State pension to their husbands.

In hindsight, it would have made more sense to simply do away with the requirement that the wife also had to have reached State pension age before the husband could claim the married man's rate of State pension. That way we wouldn't have all this WASPI nonsense now!

cisamcgu wrote: »

Another thought on my original ponderings .. by postponing the taking of a deferred pension you increase the amount but therefore increase the amount of tax paid, so might you be better off taking it as soon as you early retire rather than waiting, assuming you have no other taxable income ... hmmm....questions, questions..

The only way you could work it out to the penny would be by factoring in one vital piece of information. Your date of death.