The ‘McCloud remedy’ refers to an anti-age discriminatory protection given to members of public service pension schemes (including the LGPS), who, providing they meet the necessary criteria, will receive the greater of the ‘old’ final salary scheme benefits or the career average (CARE) scheme benefits for the period 1 April 2014 to 31 March 2022 (‘the remedy period’).
You may have noticed from this year’s pension statement that you’re now being informed whether you’re “eligible for the McCloud underpin”; this is because, for the LGPS, the McCloud remedy equates to a final salary ‘underpin’. However, not all members will be eligible for an underpin, and most of those who are eligible won’t receive an uplift. This is because, for most members, the pension they had in the CARE scheme is greater than they would’ve had, if the final salary scheme had continued beyond 2014.
For next year’s pension statements, we plan to go further than what we did in 2024. For 2025 and beyond, we plan to include the value of any McCloud uplift that would apply on 31 March 2025 and at your Normal Pension Age, though only whether the underpin would ‘bite’ (though, as noted above, the underpin is unlikely to ‘bite’ in most cases, as the CARE scheme tends to provide a greater pension than the final salary scheme would’ve provided over the remedy period).
To determine whether you qualify for an underpin, please visit our McCloud hub.