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NEWS • VIEWS • INFORMATION • ADVICE


PENSIONS UPDATE

Teaching Today sets out the position on teachers’ pensions across the UK

The NASUWT’s campaign to protect teachers’ pensions began well before the May 2010 General Election that brought the Coalition Government into office.

The Union’s highly successful Vote for Education campaign raised awareness of the plans of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Parties to attack public service pensions.

Following the General Election, the Union produced a wealth of material and information, which has been sent into the workplace, to members’ homes and placed on the website.

The Union’s advocacy on-line facility on the website, which enables members to lobby their MP, MSP, AM and MLA directly, has been used by thousands of teachers to protest about the proposed changes to pension schemes. The Pensions Latest bulletins, emails and posters have had an excellent response.

The Union’s regular opinion surveying of members on pensions have attracted responses from thousands of teachers, with the most recent one attracting over 37,000 responses, all highlighting deep anger about the Coalition’s proposals, stating a willingness to take industrial action at the appropriate time after negotiations have been exhausted.

The NASUWT has also lodged a legal challenge in the High Court on the change in indexing from the Retail Prices Index (RPI) to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI). The NASUWT is the only teachers’ union to do this.

All of the latest information on pensions and the NASUWT’s campaign can be found on www.nasuwt.org.uk/Pensions

Current position

NASUWT Pensions Latest, issued in July, reported that at a meeting of the TUC-led national discussions on 13 July, Ministers proposed a ‘dual-track’ approach to negotiations , with the central discussions continuing but with sector scheme-specific talks also taking place to inform the central discussions.

The teacher unions agreed that the pragmatic and constructive approach would be to enter into scheme-specific talks on the England and Wales schemes, the focus of the Coalition’s proposals, but that the basis on which the unions were entering the talks should be clearly set out to the Secretary of State for Education in a joint letter, with a request for a meeting.

It was the view that no discussions should take place in Scotland and Northern Ireland on teachers’ pensions until the outcome of the situation in England and Wales was known, to avoid a divide-and-rule approach on this issue.

A meeting with Minister Nick Gibb, took place on 27 July. At that meeting the NASUWT and other unions affirmed their conditions for entering into sector scheme discussions.

The NASUWT and other unions made it clear that they consider any talks will be on an exploratory, without-prejudice basis and that participation does not imply any agreement with Coalition Government proposals on public service pension reform or a willingness to accept any changes, including to the contribution rates.

Whilst the meeting was positive, no final decision on participation will be made until the Department for Education (DfE) has confirmed in writing its acceptance of the NASUWT’s and other unions’ conditions for discussion.

A fundamental outstanding issue, which needs to be resolved before any meaningful engagement can take place on contribution rates, is the failure of the Coalition to provide the valuation of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS), which was due in 2010. This valuation would have identified the level of contribution to be made by teachers in 2012/13 as a result of the cap and share mechanism introduced in 2005/06.

The implementation of the agreed cap and share is already set to save over £1bn on the teachers’ pension schemes. The provision of that valuation, or the data used to calculate it, is a vital starting point for any discussion. The NASUWT has pressed repeatedly for the information and will make it a prerequisite for discussions on contribution rates.

The NASUWT has been granted leave for the judicial review of the Coalition’s change in indexing from RPI to CPI, and a date for a hearing in October 2011 has been set. The NASUWT is the only teachers’ union pursuing legal action.

Industrial action

The NASUWT committed over two years ago to taking industrial action at the appropriate time to protect and defend teachers’ pensions. That commitment is unchanged. Teachers are also aware that although protecting pensions is critically important, other aspects of pay and conditions are under attack and that any NASUWT industrial action in the Autumn Term may need to be focused on protecting not only pensions but also other critical conditions-of-service issues, which are covered in this edition of Teaching Today.

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