When a divorce settlement is being determined by a court, the value of pensions may be considered. The Firefighters’ Pension Schemes (FPS) provides a Cash Equivalent Transfer Value (CETV) that can be considered when deciding how assets should be split.
Once a court has determined the split, a Pension Sharing Order (PSO) will be issued and the CETV is split accordingly. This creates a pension debit on the member’s record and a pension credit for the ex-spouse.
Under remedy, the value of the CETV originally provided to the court may be different for each of the legacy (FPS 1992, FPS 2006, Special FPS 2006) and reformed scheme (FPS 2015) rules and therefore revised calculations are required.
This means that due to the remedy choices that need to be offered to all members with remediable service and considering the implementation date of the PSO, there may need to be a recalculation for any PSOs that have been applied between 1 April 2015 and 30 September 2023.
A summary about how the pension debit and the pension credit are affected by remedy has been provided in the factsheet below but some of the key points are: -
- The pension debit that is applied to the member’s pension will be adjusted accordingly depending on the remedy choice that they make.
- The remedy choice made by the member has no effect on the pension credit that is awarded to the ex-spouse.
- The pension credit that is awarded to the ex-spouse will always be based on the higher of the two CETVs. This does not cost the member anything and nor do they have a higher debit applied because of this.