The Goodwin Ruling - Changes to survivor benefits

Changes to the Local Government Pension Scheme were announced to address discrimination through the introduction of the Local Government Pension Scheme (Scotland) (Amendment) Regulations 2021.  These changes ensure greater equality across all relationships and takes account of membership that was previously not counted when calculating a survivors pension.

In 2017 in a case called Walker v Innospec, Mr Walker brought a claim against his employer and the trustees of his pension scheme for unlawful discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. In a landmark ruling, the supreme court ruled that Mr Walker's husband should be entitled to a full survivors pension.

In a more recent employment tribunal case, named Mrs Goodwin v Department of Education, it was concluded that a female member in an opposite sex marriage was treated less favourably than a female in a same sex marriage or civil partnership, and that treatment amounts to direct discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.

Following these two court cases, changes to the Local Government Pension Scheme were announced to address this discrimination through the introduction of the Local Government Pension Scheme (Scotland) (Amendment) Regulations 2021.  These changes ensure greater equality across all relationships and takes account of membership that was previously not counted when calculating a survivors pension.

This change means that should a member die, we will now include the following membership when calculating the survivor’s pensions:

• where the marriage / civil partnership takes place after the member leaves the pension scheme, we will use membership the member built up on or after 6 April 1978 to calculate the survivor pension
• where the marriage / civil partnership takes place before the member leaves the pension scheme, we will also use membership the member built up before 6 April 1978

Although the amendments were made in April 2022, they have been backdated to 5 December 2005. 

Once the necessary system changes have been implemented, we will work to identify all those affected by the change.  We will revise benefits already in payment which will be backdated and will have the appropriate interest added to them. 

The majority of those affected will be male survivors of opposite sex marriages who previously were only entitled to a widowers pension based on their wife’s service after 5 April 1988. Equal benefits for opposite and same sex survivors will apply in all circumstances going forward. 

We will update this page again with more information once we are in a position to start recalculating benefits.