Legal Proceedings by HPA

[finneyb]

Stephen,

If your not signing I'd include a covering letter to state that your 'not signing' is intentional and that you are preserving your rights.

[finneyb]

Robert,

Gammie will in fact lose out with this robbery. All pensions accrued pre 1997 service get zero inflation ie fixed rate  - with inflation eating away quickly to the buying power for life. Of course, zero inflation is unjustified and is discriminatory on a number of levels.

Basically we have a Pensions Regulator that needs closing down - HoC Select Committee are looking at this.
 
We have the usual warm word 'Ethical' until it comes to reality and CH2 seem to have some difficulty in walking the talk.

We have a Board of Trustees who are selected rather than elected. I fully expect Chris Martin the £350 per hour 'professional' Trustee to disappear once this is over. He was also Chair of BHS Trustees and we have similarities between the two schemes.

The Trustees should have attended Court in 2011 to fight to have the sale proceeds of a bankrupt company used to reduce the Scheme deficit - rather than benefit shareholders; but of course if they had done that the Halcrow Trust could not have paid out on a difficult to understand criteria and I suspect may have benefitted some Trustees.  An area I would expect a future HoC Select Committee to investigate

We now have a parent company, CH2M, with a need to raise $1bn over the next 5 years to pay-off retiring shareholders  and can't do it without outside finance - external financiers will not like a DB Pension scheme, and I suspect that this is what is driving the whole process.

So the score at the moment is Shareholders 2 Pensioners 0.  A score that needs to be very well publicised if it remains.

[Tim SMITH]

Stephen

Can you please clarify the position re. preservation of one's rights to a full HPS pension by not signing the form? Surely, if CH2 gets away with its schemes, one's rights have no value: one simply has PPF rights. If, on the other hand, CH2's schemes are somehow overturned, implicit in that would be that pensioners' rights had been invalidly removed and were thus reinstated. Or have I missed something?

Evidently you are willing to pay the price for this preservation of rights, which presumably is 2.5% of pension, each and every year, so you must consider preservation important.

With time running out rapidly, I still don't know what to do!

[tonybird1946]

Robert

The 5% minimum increase for pre 1997 members is based on service to 31/3/1999.

I'm not sure that the reduction in inflation could have been forseen with such certainly as you suggest. RPI as stated in the 2012 pensions revaluation was 5.2%

The annual rate of increase for the 10 years up to 1997 was:

1988 6.8%
1989 7.7%
1990 9.3%
1991 4.5%
1992 2.6%
1993 1.9%
1994 2.9%
1995 3.2%
1996 2.5%
1997 3.6%

Hindsite is a wonderful thing.

[John Ratsey]

Can you please clarify the position re. preservation of one's rights to a full HPS pension by not signing the form? Surely, if CH2 gets away with its schemes, one's rights have no value: one simply has PPF rights. If, on the other hand, CH2's schemes are somehow overturned, implicit in that would be that pensioners' rights had been invalidly removed and were thus reinstated. Or have I missed something?

When my acceptance of Option A was rejected because it was qualified I asked the HPS Admin whether unqualified acceptance of Option A would be considered to represent surrendering my right to the pension I have earned through service with Halcrow and membership of HPS. I am waiting for an answer and am not proposing to surrender that right in case a route for recovering some / all of that lost income becomes available.

To get an extra 2.5% in return for surrendering my rights is either robbery, bribery or bullying. None of which are compatible with CH2M's ethics policy. I don't accept bribes and can be expected to react if robbed or bullied!

[John Drake]

When my acceptance of Option A was rejected because it was qualified I asked the HPS Admin whether unqualified acceptance of Option A would be considered to represent surrendering my right to the pension I have earned through service with Halcrow and membership of HPS. I am waiting for an answer and am not proposing to surrender that right in case a route for recovering some / all of that lost income becomes available.

Hi John

Could you share with us the exact wording of your qualified acceptance?

Thanks!

[Mort Deas]

I am just about to email my Option Form from the Philippines and post it by very snail mail at the same time. I was going to caveat the signing in order to reserve my rights however it appears that my form will be rejected if I do so. Does anybody know if an accompanying letter referring to the signed form and in which my rights are reserved would also cause the form to be rejected, or, would such a letter be invalid anyway?
Although silent, I have been following the proceeding with great self interest. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to those who took up the cudgel on behalf of we Halcrow pensioners and wish them all the best with their personal dilemmas over the sign/not sign issue.

[John Ratsey]

Hi John

Could you share with us the exact wording of your qualified acceptance?

John: As recommended here last week: "Accepted subject to any legal challenge not changing the position".

As noted above, I am not willing to unconditionally sign up to a deal which was cooked up, in secret, without consultation, with the transparency of thick mud and is biased against those with service pre-April 1997. Just because the PPF gives a zero % increase for such service doesn't mean it is a reasonable approach and, just lest we forget, the PPF does not pay a pension: It pays compensation.

The one-off 2.5% bribe is negligible compared to the HPS increase of 5% compounded over, say 20 years and is small compared to the likely increase in CPI (in my opinion, the minimum that should have been offered) over the same period. We should not forget that in spite of the vast amounts being spent on forcing these options onto HPS members they have refused to make the small effort of providing personal illustations of their impact relative to the existing HPS.

Mort: You can only try the separate letter approach and keep a copy. If sending via email you might get a quick feedback.

[Jane Tordoff]

The speaker at the OPA meeting on Thursday advised we send a covering letter with our form.

[John Drake]

John: As recommended here last week: "Accepted subject to any legal challenge not changing the position".

As noted above, I am not willing to unconditionally sign up to a deal which was cooked up, in secret, without consultation, with the transparency of thick mud and is biased against those with service pre-April 1997.

Thanks John, absolutely agree with that, but it's interesting that they regard what is effectively a request that they act within the law as an unacceptable qualification!

[Robert Harvey]

Just received a letter fro the Trustee stating that the response deadline is extended to 31 August.  Also that "no qualification" will be accepted and to ignore "forums" (by which I do not doubt they mean HPA). Have everyone else had this?

[Jane Tordoff]

There is a thread under the heading "HPS Option Deadline Postponed..." I would expect that all HPS members have received this letter.

[Tony Hoyle]

Robert,

Gammie will in fact lose out with this robbery. All pensions accrued pre 1997 service get zero inflation ie fixed rate  - with inflation eating away quickly to the buying power for life. Of course, zero inflation is unjustified and is discriminatory on a number of levels.

[Tony Hoyle]

I may be wrong but I understood that Group Board had a separate pension scheme.

[Tim SMITH]

I may be wrong but I understood that Group Board had a separate pension scheme.

Hmm, I wonder whether that scheme is in any sort of difficulty?