Category: Blog

Rachel Reeves MP, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered the Autumn Budget on 30 October 2024. In the weeks before the Budget, speculation ran rife on what could be announced on issues such as taking tax-free cash from a pension arrangement, tax-relief on pension contributions and changes to the Annual Allowance.

When it comes to the remedy of offsetting on divorce—distributing non-pension assets of the marriage so as to take account of differences in pensions—there is a question that we at Mathieson Consulting Ltd get asked more than any other, and it is about multiplying by two versus dividing by two.

Those working in the Pensions on Divorce arena (whether PODEs, solicitors or scheme administrators) will by now be all too familiar with the McCloud ruling, and how much additional work this has caused for cases involving public sector pension schemes.

It is widely acknowledged that pensions issues are most typically dealt with on divorce using an offsetting approach i.e. non-pension assets are distributed in such a fashion as to take account of one party’s having greater pension provision than the other.

The purpose of this blog is to follow up on our recent webinar, which provided an update on the implementation of the McCloud remedy.

POD Forms are required by a number of the public sector pension scheme administrators before a Cash Equivalent Value (CEV) can be provided for divorce purposes. Therefore, knowing when the form will be required and getting it completed by your client ASAP will help to reduce the time it takes to get your PODE Report.

A presentation on the recent impact of the McCloud Judgment, including a walk-through of case studies.

This is our third (and final) blog of 2023 that relates to the implications of the McCloud ruling on the sharing of pensions and divorce. The purpose of this blog is to provide an update to family solicitors on what we have seen happen since the McCloud remedy implementation day of 1 October 2023.

In less than a month from now the McCloud remedy will have been implemented across all public sector schemes.  This means that—in theory at least—for holders of public sector pensions the relevant pension scheme should be able to set out what the impact of the McCloud remedy is on benefits accrued from 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2022

The McCloud ruling (The Lord Chancellor v McCloud & Others [2018] EWCA Civ 2844) relates to the way in which public sector pension schemes were reformed in the early 2010s