Honour pension protections for nuclear workers.

When companies in the nuclear sector were privatised, employees were granted statutory pension protections. Now, after many years, the Government is using spurious excuses to justify proposals to override the protections and impose detrimental changes. These proposals must be completely withdrawn.

Pension protections were negotiated for workers in the nuclear sector to ensure privatisation succeeded. Employees kept to their commitment, Government should not renege on its part.

In arguing that pensions for nuclear workers should follow the same reforms as public sector workers, Government is guilty of cherry picking the detrimental changes it wants to apply while ignoring the improvements that those reforms would entail.

Government has already achieved enough savings from these schemes.

The Government understands the concerns of the workforce across the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority estate about public sector pension reform, bearing in mind the existence of statutory pension protections.. The Government is supportive of the decommissioning programme and has allocated £11 billion of taxpayer funding over the 2015 Spending Review period, which recognises the vital work the workforce delivers on decommissioning, while maintaining the priority of safe and secure operations. The NDA has also been set a challenging programme of over £1 billion of efficiencies and savings for this period, part of which must come from the reform of two final salary defined benefit pension schemes within the NDA estate.

Government policy on public sector pensions follows from recommendations made the Independent Public Service Pensions Commission’s report in 2011. The main recommendation is to reform final salary, defined benefit schemes in favour of Career Averaged Revalued Earnings schemes (CARE). The aim is to make the current and future costs of public sector pensions fairer between scheme members and other taxpayers and put them on an affordable and sustainable footing. Recommendations were enacted through the provisions of the Public Services Pension Act 2013.

The majority of public sector schemes have been reformed already. The Government have set a deadline of April 2018 to reform remaining public sector schemes, including those within the NDA estate and to be guided by the previous reforms. The NDA estate, which receives the majority of its funding from the public purse is classified as public sector by the Office of National Statistics and therefore within scope for pension reform. The ONS determines whether a body falls within the public sector by reference to objective criteria – based upon whether the governance, funding, ownership and function of these bodies demonstrate that they are controlled by government.