The High Court has rejected an appeal by three government bodies against a Pensions Ombudsman determination restoring Michael Gleeson’s full pension benefits under arrangements made with Trinity College in 2005.
The appeal was brought by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, the Department of Education and the Higher Education Authority. The court considered whether the Ombudsman had made a serious or significant error in deciding that ministerial discretion over the pension had not arisen when Mr Gleeson retired in 2011.
Mr Gleeson’s revised employment terms, confirmed in a letter from the Provost dated 15 July 2005, provided for full pension from age 60. The College paid €544,000 into its pension scheme in instalments from April 2005 after actuaries calculated the cost of the change. Mr Gleeson retired at 60 on 31 July 2011 and initially received an annual pension of €92,153.
The Ministers later directed the College to reduce the pension and recover excess payments, treating the retirement as early and applying an actuarial reduction. The annual amount was reduced to €71,674. The Higher Education Authority rejected Mr Gleeson’s appeal in 2012. The Pensions Ombudsman allowed a further appeal in June 2014, finding that the relevant decision had been made in 2005, before the Ministers assumed powers previously exercised by the scheme trustees.
The appellants argued that the Ombudsman had misread the scheme rules and that required formal consent to increase benefits had not been given by the College Board. The High Court accepted that the College’s decision-making involved maladministration and that the wrong pension-scheme rule had been invoked. However, it held that the Ombudsman was entitled to find, on the evidence, that the employment terms had changed in 2005 and that Mr Gleeson did not retire early in 2011.
Justice Baker said the Ombudsman could consider the contractual arrangements when deciding the pension complaint. On the facts found, the court agreed that the relevant rule concerned changing the normal pension age, rather than an early retirement requiring ministerial discretion over augmentation. The court concluded that the Ombudsman’s determination, considered as a whole, contained no serious or significant error.
The statutory appeal therefore failed. The judgment did not determine a separate contractual action between Mr Gleeson and the College; it upheld the Ombudsman’s resolution of the pension complaint.