Originally Posted by
Party Animal
Easy Street - I think you're wrong on 2 counts fella - which shows that confusion is still out there!
Firstly, there is no maximum number of years' Service that can count towards your pension, i.e, it is not capped at age 60 (page 6 of the AFPS15 booklet). I say this as I personally know of a few people extending beyond 60 (MEOS+) and still flying on the FL.
I didn't mean to imply that AFPS15 ends at age 60, apologies if I gave that impression. Was just using 60 as the new 'standard' retirement age to indicate that additional accrual is possible.
Secondly, for those on AFPS75 only, the previous dit on pensions being less at age 60, if you leave at that age, compared to leaving at 55 is accurate and doesn't need CPI to be anything like 4.2%. It just needs to be more than the annual pay rise. As a simplified example and using 50% pension and a salary of £60k:
Man A leaves at 55 with a £30k pension. If the CPI was %2.1, then his pension would be £30,630 at 56, £31,273 at 57, £31,929 at 58, £32,600 at 59 and £33,285 at age 60.
Man B stays in the RAF and gets a pay rise of 0%, 1%, 1%, 2% and 0% respectively up to the age of 60, whereby his pay would be £62,430. 50% of this = £31,215 at age 60.
So over the last 5 years, staying in from age 55 - 60 results in a significantly lesser pension for those old boys stuck on AFPS75. This is where McCloud changes everything and as others such as LJ has suggested, it is really good news for some of us.
I'm not confused, that was precisely my point (you'll note I wrote "the difference now is..."). Even with a 5-year pay freeze, Man B in your example will now accrue an AFPS15 pension of 5 x 2.1% = 10.5% salary on top of his AFPS75 pension. This addition will outweigh index-linking of a 50% pension providing CPI remains less than 4.2% above any pay award.