Purple book and PPF letter sheds light on Pre-97 increases (to actuary Colin Haines)

He continues

FYI The PPF did modelling on various benefit improvements for the Work & Pensions Select Committee in August 2025.  Given its timing, there does not appear to have been too much said in the industry on this at the time (certainly relative to what has been said on salary sacrifice in the last month)

Colin finds a letter

The letter is downloadable here, in their Resource Library: 

Or you can read it from the page

From which he extracts these points of interest:

• Prospective increases for existing members adds £1.2bn to liabilities – an overall increase of 7% (or an increase of 9-10% if we only consider schemes that had such increases)
• Applying increases retrospectively, as well as prospectively, on existing PPF members would have cost £3.9bn – perhaps considered too much (including politically) despite being less than 30% of the PPF surplus
• Applying this to all schemes (ie schemes where pre-97 increases was only discretionary) would have added an extra £0.4bn of costs
• This now makes the PPF 10% more generous for schemes with such increases – so making buy-in to buy-out decisions for such schemes even more complex
  • And what if the PPF/Government in the future decided to apply surpluses to fund retrospective increases

And Colin provides additional information:

• Increase in liabilities from a CPI (2.5%) cap on Pre-97, for schemes that provided such indexation, was £1.2bn
  • See Table 1b, line 1
  • Baseline liabilities for the modelling were £18.1bn (with assets of £32.2bn and surplus “reserve” of £14bn)
  • This is a 7% increase in liabilities; and a 11% drop in funding level (to 163%)
• The PPF also calculated that giving pre-97 indexation to all members (including those in schemes without such indexation) would have been £1.6bn (See Table 1a, line 2).
  • So, by deduction,
    • Cost of providing indexation to those that had it in rules: £1.2bn
    • Cost of providing indexation to everyone else: £0.4bn
  • So we can summise and say approximately 75% of schemes had pre-97 increases, c £14bn liabilities
    • Those that had such increases see the value PPF liabilities increasing by 9-10%
    • Those without see a 0% increase in liabilities
  • This improves PPF benefits by around 10% for those schemes that had such increases
• However if applied retrospectively, current pensions would now be higher and so would the cost of providing them prospectively
  • The total cost for retrospective and prospective increases is £5.2bn for all (including arrears):  see Table 1a, line 8
    • £3.9bn for those where indexation was in rules (Table 1b, line 5)
    • £1.3bn for those where it was not (by deduction)
    • £5.2bn improvement would increased liabilities by 29%, and funding level by 40% (to 138%)

William McGrath had prompted the discussion with this nugget;

Shalin Bhagwan (PPF actuary) refers to page 82 of Budget costings.

McGrath’s comment

Not totally clear. Seems pre 97 is in for new PPF entrants . That does change the risk benefit count for TAS 300 exercises. Run on with higher UK asset allocation and The Bell does chime for an economic stimulus.

I find it hard to make head or tail of all this information but I hope that putting this information out in public will give the likes of Terry Monk a chance to get some if not all the money due before he grows too old to enjoy it.