The High Court dismissed Maurice Scraggs’s application for an order compelling the Pensions Board to investigate his complaint about reductions to members’ benefits in the Bank of Ireland staff pension scheme.
In a judgment delivered on 19 November 2013, Mr Justice Hogan said the Board’s decision not to use its investigative powers was not factually unsustainable or unreasonable. The court did not decide whether the scheme’s trustees were legally entitled to reduce benefits to meet the cost of the pensions levy.
Scraggs, a former Bank of Ireland employee who took voluntary redundancy in March 2002, was a deferred member of the scheme. The levy was introduced under the Finance (No. 2) Act 2011. The judgment said the scheme’s administrators paid €35.5 million to the Revenue Commissioners for the 2011 and 2012 levies. After the Bank was unwilling to absorb the cost, the trustees decided to reduce members’ benefits by just over 1% and notified them by circular in July 2012.
Scraggs argued that the Board had failed properly to investigate his complaint and should have appointed an authorised officer under section 18 of the Pensions Act 1990. The Board said it saw no indication that the trustees had breached the Act and considered there were no good grounds for an investigation.
Justice Hogan described the Board’s investigation powers as directed at suspected serious wrongdoing, such as misuse of scheme resources or undisclosed deficits. He said Scraggs’s complaint, at its highest, was that the trustees might have made an error of law when exercising their statutory powers. The judge expressed no view on whether they had done so.
The court said any challenge to the trustees’ decision, if properly founded, would have to be pursued through private law litigation against the trustees. It dismissed the application for mandamus against the Board, which had sought to compel it to act.