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Tens of thousands more former miners could benefit after the government announced a review of a controversial pension scheme.
The chancellor used last month. Budget to scrap 30-year-old arrangements which saw the government receive hundreds of millions of pounds annually from the Mineworkers Pension Scheme (MPS).
Rachel Reeves pledged to pay the first installment of £1.5bn on Friday.
The Government has now confirmed it will look at other miners’ pensions after former pit managers in the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme (BCSSS) challenged their exclusion from new payments.
Earlier this month, Dave Craddick, who worked at Hagpit in Whitehaven, Cumbria, for 20 years, told the BBC it was “unfair” that BCSSS workers were being given “not a penny” back. will
He said the government had taken £4.8bn from the MPS fund, and £3.2bn from the BCSSS, so the scheme was also owed money.
At the time, a spokesperson for the Department of Energy gave no indication that there would be any future changes and said the government “must consider both schemes separately”.
But the department has now announced it will “consider any proposals put forward by the trustees of the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme”.
Last week, trustees asked ministers to return £2.3bn of investment reserves to scheme members.
When British Coal was privatized in 1994, both schemes were taken over by the government.
The agreements were reached between the then Conservative government and the trustees of the scheme, in exchange for the government guaranteeing that the value of miners’ pensions would not be reduced.
The recent changes to MPS arrangements will see the pensions of 112,000 ex-miners rise by a third.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said it marked the end of “decades of injustice which have denied thousands of people across the country the decent pensions they undoubtedly deserve”.
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