Press and media

Pensions Action Group would like to thank all those in the media who have publicised and supported our cause over all the years we have been campaigning. Your help in fighting the injustice of lost pensions has been magnificent! We are therefore very willing to provide you with whatever information you need for your publications, to provide interviews and assist in whatever way we can. We understand the pressures which you sometimes have to work under, understand deadlines, and seek no oversight over the way in which you may present our campaign. A free press is a healthy press!

Hopefully you will find many of the answers you need on this website. PAG makes all text and pictures on this site available for general use. Where PAG owns the copyright, use of the material is covered by the Creative Commons CC BY-SA licence (as used by Wikipedia).

If you need more, please send a message to contact-us@pensionstheft.org. We will then be able to put you in direct contact with whoever can best respond to your questions.

Notes for Editors

1. The Pensions Action Group is a non-political organisation representing people who lost most, in some cases all, of their occupational pensions when their pension scheme was wound up, either because their employer became insolvent or the employer, (perfectly legally), decided to close the scheme. Such members now receive some payment from either the Financial Assistance Scheme (FAS) or the Pensions Protection Fund (PPF) depending on the date of the wind-up, but MPs and the public are being misled about the level of protection these schemes provide.
   
   
2. The FAS and PPF have been widely described as providing “90% of pensions”. For most members, however, factors such as the lack of protection against inflation ("indexation"), the impact of the cap and the way ill heath benefits are handled means the true provision is often much lower. In fact for some the value of the pension can fall below 50% of the expected pension.
   
   
3. Under the FAS, only pensionable service between April 1997 and the start of scheme wind-up qualifies for very limited indexation. All schemes in the FAS only have a very limited post-1997 qualifying period (because only schemes starting wind-up before 2005 are included) even though the vast majority of schemes actually provided indexation on all service, both before and after 1997. Under the PPF, again, it is only post-1997 service that increases in payment, but as each year passes the proportion of post-1997 service increases and in 2019 it is already potentially 22 years more than the first FAS scheme failures.
   
   
4. Inflation experienced by pensioners is greater than both CPI & RPI because a higher proportion of their income is spent on energy, utility bills, food and council tax.
   
   
5. The income (pension) cap that is applied by FAS & PPF penalises long-service employees and, without indexation, the cap reduces in value as does the pension, whereas the Government told us that the cap will retain its value.
   
   
6. During any time of high unemployment it is almost impossible for those between 55 and their normal retirement age to gain employment and they are being denied access to even their reduced pension benefits.
   
   
7. The main reason that the government gives for not paying 100% is that the tax-payer cannot afford it. During the financial crisis in 2008 however, they were able to pay at a stroke to restore  pensions of bank employees in full even though they were under no obligation to do so - no 90%, no cap, no reduced indexation. The cost of the banks' very generous pensions was much, much greater than the restoration of our own pensions so cost is clearly not an issue when the will is there.