The Government Actuary’s Department (GAD) has developed a retirement calculator for public sector pension scheme members that aims to help relevant workers understand benefits options information on their pensions more clearly.

The online tool, of which the first is scheduled to go live this month (March), will be rolled out to several clients across the public sector in the coming financial year.

It aims to help people understand their pension implications following the McCloud ruling, which found that changes to public sector pensions were discriminatory on the grounds of age.

The judgment means that some public sector pension scheme members have the choice between two different types of benefits: legacy schemes or reformed schemes.

The government previously confirmed that it would proceed with the deferred choice underpin approach when providing members with their options following McCloud, whereby affected members will make their decision between legacy and reformed scheme benefits shortly before benefits are paid from the scheme.

The retirement calculator will use projections to illustrate what people will get at their chosen retirement age for both options.

Once a member adds in their basic details, the tool takes pay rises and working patterns into account to help members understand the different benefits they may be eligible for during the remedy period, which runs from 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2022.

GAD actuary, John Bayliss, who developed the tool, commented: “This is really about helping members understand their benefits and putting this into context. We expect this will sit along with other member information on pension portals.

“Once people answer some quick questions, the system will determine if they will be affected. It then refers pension scheme members to the retirement calculator.

“This is new for GAD and over the course of the last year we’ve had to learn some elements of how to do this from scratch. We intend to apply this learning in different areas such as live interactive reporting which we’ve not been able to do before.”

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