There are parts of a weekend when you’re finding yourself wanting to hear someone talking at you. I start this blog with a five year old news item linking Stagecoach with Aberdeen and will revert to the heritage of the December 2025 deal in a moment. The pension deal isn’t the first time Stagecoach and Aberdeen have been in the news for “heritage” and in a moment you can hear the second (that I know of!)
But first a hat tip to the podcast – a medium I have some grudging respect for.
I have a time to listen to BBC ones (Newscast, Americast and Jools Holland’s Earlier are regular; In our Time is in repeat and needing a new Chair and my pension one (VFM) has gone on the blink. I wondered why I listened to so much of Nico and Darren and realise it is because it makes me understand what I feel by disagreeing with what they and their guests say. I also liked their regularity and hope they’re only gone to the new year. It is interesting to know how out of line I am with you and for you, if a regular reader of my blog to work out where I’m going right and wrong.
This morning I listened to Ben Farmer of Hymans Robertson to fill in the VFM gap and because it has my friend John Hamilton as guest. Except it’s less than 2 minutes long so rather different. I want editing like this!
This is the edited cast and it says what I wanted John to say earlier in the week at the hour + Pension PlayPen seminar. It said what the cap on increases to pensions will be each year (CPIH up to 5%) and what’s happened to all the caps on the various sections of the pension in the past (Stagecoach is really a lot of smaller schemes from different deals). This is the important detail for those who had been capped by the pre-97 rules and is a precedent they can point to when arguing that the cap’s unnecessarily in place in their scheme.
Beyond what has to be offered, everything will be based on what Stagecoach Trustees can afford, what their pension can afford, how their pension obligations are changing, what the Trustees chose as prudent.
As John has said it to me on the phone but never where I have it documented (yes I take this podcast to be a document) then it helps my position on surpluses for scrapping heritage restrictions and treating all pensioners together.
There is a lot of flannel out there and in 2026 I want to cut out the nonsense and focus on stuff like this two minutes. Because the point of being regular (as I hope to be) is that people can agree or not agree but know this is the view of one person. This is not a corporate podcast, is not monitored by a compliance team or by a marketing department. That is why John Hamilton’s little two minute gem is important to me. It fills the gap that hearsay doesn’t!
Thanks Hymans and thanks Stagecoach Trustees, most of all thanks John Hamilton for telling us what the Aberdeen transfer means to Stagecoach bus-drivers in its DB scheme.
If you haven’t made the connection , Bluebird was the kind of company that Stagecoach picked up over the year and Bluebird’s pension may be part of the heritage of schemes that Stagecoach has within its scheme. It may or may not, Derek Scott or John Hamilton can tell me! It is live history that helps us understand why the deal is important to 22,000 people round the country who are benefiting right now!
The full podcast – after all!
Thanks to Ben Farmer, who reminds me that Hymans podcasts last a little longer than 2 minutes and the snippet that I’ve included can be fully listened to (all 31 minutes) from here!
And please scroll down to the prequel to the StAb transfer and read Derek Scott’s anticipated commentary (though unexpected comment!)
I’m glad John Hamilton’s done a count – 54 – of how many separate schemes make up the Stagecoach Group Pension Scheme (“SGPS”). I would have said 57 (varieties), but I’ve never counted them.
Stagecoach did buy one of the Bluebird bus companies (the yellow one, known as Northern Scottish Omnibuses) at privatisation in 1991.
Future membership of a DB scheme was one of the conditions of privatisation sales in those days, so we offered SGPS, which had been formed two years earlier by the merger of three separate Standard Life DB schemes for companies Stagecoach bought in the National Bus Company (“NBC”) privatisation in 1987: Hampshire Bus, Cumberland Motor Services and United Counties.
But whereas quite a lot of the former NBC active members also transferred their accrued benefits to the Stagecoach scheme, there was virtually none among the Bluebird employees, who left their historic benefits in the Scottish Bus Group (“SBG”) pension scheme.
The SBG scheme was eventually bought out … by Standard Life, and today form part of the Phoenix Life legacy pensions.
As for “surplus”, the SBG members were told at the time of the privatisation there was none.
But thanks to the efforts of a pensioners’ ginger group and a former Labour MP, Dennis Canavan, by then an independent MSP in the Scottish Parliament, a share of surplus of £100m was eventually secured from HM Treasury in 2002 and paid out by the Scottish Public Pensions Agency.
I worked with the pensioners’ group, spoke at Holyrood Committee meetings (we’d petitioned the Parliament) and sat with Dennis Canavan in the Parliament when the topic was discussed.
But because the SBG scheme had been bought out already, the surplus when it was finally awarded was taxable. And a final irony was that the largest individual beneficiaries were the former SBG executives who, as trustees, had maintained there was no surplus at privatisation.
Thank you Derek. People may think I set you up but I didn’t. This Bluebird pension story is an extraordinary prequel and I’m very glad we can all know about Bluebird and the Scottish Public Pensions Agency. The irony is not lost!