By Sarah Jenkins
It has certainly been a busy few weeks for pensions in the law courts. Hot on the heels of the High Court decision on GMP equalisation, the Supreme Court last week handed down judgment in Barnardo’s v Buckinghamshire and others, the latest in a line of cases dealing with the appropriate index to use in increasing pensions in payment.
RPI/CPI – the background
The Pensions Act 1995 introduced requirements for pensions accrued on and from April 1997 to be increased to protect their value against the impact of inflation. The minimum levels of increase are set out in secondary legislation and for many years were based on changes to the Retail Prices Index (RPI), capped at a particular percentage.
