Government to review second miners pension scheme

Tens of thousands more former mineworkers could be set to benefit after the government announced it would review a controversial pension scheme.

The chancellor used last month’s Budget to scrap a 30-year old arrangement that saw the government receive hundreds of millions of pounds a year from the Mineworkers Pension Scheme (MPS).

The first instalment of the £1.5bn Rachel Reeves pledged to pay back will be made on Friday.

The government has now confirmed it will look at a second miners’ pension after former pit managers in the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme (BCSSS) challenged their exclusion from the new payments.

Earlier this month, Dave Cradduck, who spent 20 years working at Haig Pit in Whitehaven, Cumbria, told the BBC it was “unjust” that “not a penny” would be given back to those on the BCSSS.

He said the government had taken £4.8bn out of the MPS fund, and £3.2bn out of BCSSS, so therefore those on that scheme were also owed money.

At the time, a spokesperson for the Department for Energy gave no indication that any future changes would take place and said the government “must consider the two schemes separately”.

But the department has now announced it would “review any proposals set out by the Trustees of the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme”.

Last week, the trustees asked ministers to hand back the £2.3bn investment reserve to members of the scheme.

Both schemes were taken over by the government when British Coal was privatised in 1994.

The agreements were struck between the then-Conservative government and the scheme’s trustees, in exchange for a government guarantee that the value of mineworkers’ pensions would not decrease.

The recent reversal of the MPS arrangement will see 112,000 former miners’ pensions increased by a third.

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said it “marks an end to a decades-long injustice that has denied thousands across the country the decent pension that they so undeniably deserve”.