The BBC has again lost in its attempt to play jiggery-pokery with the rules of the BBC pension scheme. You may recall that last year it went to the High Court for permission to alter the meaning of the rule that protects the scheme and its members from being altered, to their disadvantage, by the BBC. The BBC said it would appeal and it did so last month. Its arguments were simply a straightforward rehash of last year's ones. But with remarkable swiftness - in just 12 days - the three Appeal Court judges handed down their judgement (published on Tuesday here: https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewca/civ/2024/767) in which they smacked the BBC right out of the ground. They supported entirely the judgement of the original High Court judge and provided a comprehensive rebuttal of the arguments put forward this second time around by the BBC's KC.  So, for the time being, things stay as they are for active members. The BBC is prevented from doing things like reducing the accrual rate, at which future pension is built up, or imposing higher contribution rates on those members. The BBC issued a rather churlish statement to staff saying it would not pursue its legal arguments any further but threatened to do something unspecified to their pension arrangements anyway. I suspect the BBC will simply close the scheme entirely. It has been closed to new joiners for more than a decade now, and the BBC could simply close it to further accrual. As a former elected trustee myself, I thought the attitude of the current trustees to the recent court hearings was remarkably relaxed. They took part more or less as a neutral observer rather than as any sort of defender of the members' interests. For its part, the BBC Pensioners Association wasn't interested at all, believing that any changes could have no effect on the security of pensions already in payment. We may be about to find out of that is true or not.