THANK you for covering the unsuccessful attempt by John Walker, at the Court of Appeal in England, to ensure that his husband would benefit fairly from his decades of pension contributions, should Mr Walker die first (“Gay man loses fight on pension”, The Herald, October 7).
At the moment, Mr Walker's husband stands to receive a tiny fraction of the survivor's benefit that, if Mr Walker had married a woman on the same date, she would receive.
This is a clear case of sexual orientation discrimination, undermining marriage equality. It is a reserved matter, so the Scottish Government cannot change the law, although it has ensured that this discrimination does not apply in the Scottish public sector pension schemes which it does control.
It is unfortunate that the Court of Appeal decided it had no scope to overturn the current discriminatory practice in some private sector pension schemes, but we hope that Mr Walker may find the energy and resources to appeal to the European Court of Justice. Sexual orientation discrimination in employment-related benefits is a clear beach of EU equality law.
You report that the UK Government has costed the removal of this discrimination at £3.3 billion. In fact the Government's own estimate of the cost, published in June 2014, of removing the sexual orientation discrimination in pension schemes is a total of £20 million for public sector pension schemes and £100 million for private sector pension companies.
This cost would be spread over many years. It is less than 0.01 per cent of total UK pension funds, and tiny compared to the changes in pension funds resulting from daily investment performance changes.
Tim Hopkins,
Equality Network,
30 Bernard Street,
Edinburgh.
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