ONE of Scotland’s largest councils has said it is committed to honouring pensions promises made to female employees as part of an equal-pay settlement despite missing a deadline imposed by lawyers acting for the women.
North Lanarkshire Council was in 2016 ordered by government body the Scottish Public Pensions Agency to give all women the option of having their settlements treated as pensionable pay, but has so far not informed the Strathclyde Pension Fund what their new entitlements should be.
The GMB union, which is representing 200 of the 2,000 women affected, instructed Thompsons Solicitors to take action against the council if it had not completed the process by the end of March.
READ MORE: Glasgow City Council accused of perpetuating equal-pay discrimination
GMB regional organiser Hazel Nolan said that the union has extended that deadline to April 16 but will launch breach of contract proceedings against the council if there has been no progress by that point.
While the council is responsible for recalculating the women’s pension benefits, those calculations must then be approved by the Strathclyde Pension Fund, which is the relevant section of the Local Government Pension Scheme.
A spokeswoman for North Lanarkshire Council said that the local authority has “met with Strathclyde Pension Fund and calculations are being finalised”.
“We expect to complete the process shortly,” she said.
At £130 million North Lanarkshire - Scotland’s largest local authority after Glasgow City Council, the City Of Edinburgh Council and Fife Council - has so far paid out more than any other Scottish council to settle equal pay claims.
The pensions issue relates to the so-called second-wave of claims, which came after a 2006 pay deal designed to iron out historical discrepancies between what men and women were paid for work of equal value was itself found to be discriminatory.
Pensions have become an issue more recently because in 2013 the Local Government Pension Scheme began basing benefits on the average amount employees earn throughout their career rather than their final salaries, as had been the case up to that point.
READ MORE: Glasgow City Council pension claims see equal pay bill soar to £1bn
Previously, moving a still-working woman up the pay scale would have been enough to put her at the right level for final salary benefits on retirement.
With career average, however, when past earnings are factored in the sum a woman’s pension is based on will be lower than it should be regardless of what she is earning on the day she retires.
Crucially, it would make her pension lower than that of a man earning the same at retirement.
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