The question of what might happen to the BBC Pension Fund if the Corporation ever disappeared or was taken over was raised at the last London Pensioners Liaison Meeting in October 2001.

My notes suggest that the Pension Fund and its supervision by the Trustees is separate from the BBC. It cannot be accessed by the Corporation - and by implication any successor to the Corporation. But negatively, the Corp or successor could reduce its contributions.

The suggestion was that it was more vulnerable to poor investment decisions and the bear market in recent times has reduced its value. Money had been moved from one of the 10 or so fund managers, Schroeders, because of their poor performance.

OK, so the people who run the fund would put everything in the best possible light, but the overall impression was that we were as safe as we could be and a good deal safer than commercial organisations.

There could well have been more detailed reporting in the subsequent Prospero. Certainly the Pensioner Trustee Don Creasey has a very good grip on all these issues and is a brilliant advocate for us! There are moves afoot to get a second pensioner trustee, but I am not optimistic.
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This is a great list of links.  Thanks for putting them all together.

Yesterday's FT  reports that Unison has launched a campaign to stop companies switching off their final-salary based schemes.

It also mentions that the Government has eased the regulations, in order to help hard-pressed pension funds, giving them three to 10 years to restore any underfunding, rather than the current one to five years.

Click Here to read the story.

I raised this in Ariel late last year but the official response was to ignore it... and I've since been trying to get Ariel to tackle the issue... as far as I know it has not... and despite Eileen Mullen's very useful info, well I frankly have little faith that our trustees won't - at some stage - take a tough, benefit-cutting line... having ditched the old and very decent scheme, and year after year failing to give pensioners the increases that could be available....hmm?

I have long felt that the final salary schemes are not entirely equitable.  If a man did a perfectly good satisfactory job for 40 years but without getting any promotion his pension related to the amount paid in will be far less than that received by the person who gets numerous promotions during the last decade of his service.  Surely the problem lies in the lack of legislation to protect pension funds and the modern almost universal tendency to live for today and hang tomorrow.

I can not help feeling that if I had been able to invest all the money in property which I and the BBC had paid into the fund on my behalf and managed that property myself I should now be better off.  Further more when I die the property would be part of my estate, not lost to my family for good.  I say this because I do own a small property which I let and which augments my pension very nicely.