Pensioners press for automatic inflation increases

It has contacted the chairman of the Reuters Pension Fund trustees, Greg Meekings, and requested that members should be consulted before he signs a new deal with Thomson Reuters, which he expects to do some time in the next six months. 

“Our concern is that pensioners will be presented with a solution… which may not be acceptable to us," the group’s chair Angela Dean said in a letter to Meekings. 

Pensioners have had increases in only three of the last nine years, and the value of their pensions has been eroded by almost 20 per cent because of inflation.

A growing number of the 8,000 members of the RPF are becoming extremely elderly and frail, living on small pensions and facing real hardship as inflation bites into what little they get, the group said.

Thomson Reuters is one of the few major companies in Britain to have suspended inflation rises for its final salary pensioners. Most have inflation-proofing written into their pension fund rules. 

CEO Tom Glocer has expressed sympathy for the plight of Reuters pensioners. “We… look forward to reaching a solution that meets our common desire to secure pensioners’ retirements,” he wrote to the PRG last year. 

The rules of the current pensions agreement, established in 2006, allow for discretionary increases only when the Fund is in surplus. That agreement should have ended in 2010 but will remain in force until a new deal is negotiated with the company, which should be by next March. ■