Every McCloud has a silver lining

Between the 28th and 30th August I will be attending the International Pension & Employee Benefits Lawyers Association’s (IPEBLA) 18th International Conference in Amsterdam. I am looking forward to discussing the current trends and issues in pension law with lawyers from across multiple jurisdictions.

At the conference, I will be speaking as part of a panel on; ‘Changes and their Challenges to the Contribution and Benefit Structures of DB Pension Plans for Public Sector Employees’. Public sector pension scheme reform is a pressing issue for many governments, as they weigh up the legal implications of reforming public sector schemes, in order to make them affordable and sustainable.

I will be discussing the UK Court of Appeal’s decision in the McCloud case in 2018, where protections from public sector pension reforms offered by the UK government to those closest to retirement were found to be age discriminatory. I will cover how the McCloud case came about, what principles from the case may be relevant elsewhere internationally and considering with the panel the wider learning points for other governments.

This promises to be a really interesting discussion and I am looking forward to seeing other attendees at the conference.