Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, when he will respond to the consultation, Pension Protection Fund: draft regulations to take account of bridging pensions, published on 31 August 2017.

This consultation, which closed on 1 October 2017, sought views on the approach to address the bridging pensions anomaly within Pension Protection Fund compensation. The vast majority of consultation respondents agreed that the anomaly should be addressed. However, a significant number were in favour of an alternative approach which more closely reflected the original pension scheme rules and after careful consideration, the Government has decided to proceed with this alternative. On Friday 17 November 2017, my Department launched a technical consultation on the draft regulations to implement this scheme rules based approach.