Policy background Judicial Pensions
The Public Service Pensions Act 2013 (PSPA 2013) introduced a statutory framework for the reform of public service pension schemes. Following a public consultation exercise, the New Judicial Pension Scheme 2015 (NJPS) was established under the Judicial Pensions Regulations 2015 (JPS 2015).
	This resulted in many changes to judicial pensions, with the most significant being that members in NJPS were now subject to annual and lifetime allowance limits on the tax-relieved benefits accrued due to the tax-registered nature of the scheme. These changes had a disproportionate impact on the judiciary, resulting in recruitment and retention issues. These were underlined by the fact that the first ever unfilled vacancy at the High Court occurred in the 2014/15 recruitment exercise.
	In 2018, the Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB) published its Major Review of the Judicial Salary Structure which confirmed evidence of significant and escalating recruitment and retention problems at all levels of the judiciary. They concluded that the principal cause of this was the cumulative impacts of the 2015 public pension reforms and subsequent changes to pension tax thresholds.
	This is an issue for the judiciary because many senior judges are in a position where they have accrued significant private sector pensions prior to taking up judicial office, which means that the pension tax charges would be felt more acutely and by a significant proportion. Moreover, owing to the judiciary’s unique constitutional role, salaried judges are not able to work in private practice after taking up office and they are also appointed on the understanding that they will not return to private practice once they have retired. Their options for supplementing their income are therefore limited. Furthermore, many judges are also in the unusual position of taking a pay cut to join the judiciary. These factors are key to explaining why the judicial pension scheme is a vital part of judicial remuneration and integral to recruitment and retention.
	Responding to the SSRB’s review in June 2019, the Government introduced a temporary Recruitment and Retention Allowance for certain senior salaried judges who were eligible to join NJPS and made a commitment to develop a pensions-based solution for the whole judiciary, which would address, in the long-term, the recruitment and retention problems identified by the SSRB.
	In July 2020, the Government published a consultation setting out its plan to introduce a reformed judicial pension scheme that would be in line with the main principles of the 2015 reforms but also retain key elements of the legacy schemes. For this reason, the reformed scheme contains many features of the 2015 schemes: benefits are based on career average earnings rather than final salary; the Normal Pension Age is linked to State Pension Age; and members have an option to commute part of their pension in exchange for a lump sum, instead of being given an automatic lump sum on retirement. Crucially, to address the recruitment and retention issues, the reformed scheme will be tax-unregistered, like the judicial legacy schemes, and have a higher accrual rate compared to the NJPS. The aim, as confirmed by the consultation, is to have this open to all eligible salaried and fee-paid judicial office holders from 1 April 2022, where they can accrue benefits under it.
	The response to this consultation published by the Ministry of Justice in February 2021 confirmed the intention to implement the reformed scheme in line with the proposals set out in the published consultation document in July 2020.
	Public service pensions are a devolved matter for Northern Ireland (NI) and are established under separate primary legislation to that in Great Britain. NI scheme provisions are broadly identical to the comparable schemes in Great Britain. Separate consultations were carried out for public service pensions schemes in Northern Ireland. The Department of Finance consulted on the broadly identical policy options to the Treasury and the outcome of their consultation reflected that of the Treasury. The Department for Communities carried out a consultation for the Local Government pension scheme NI. Their approach remains identical to that proposed for the equivalent scheme in Britain.