On 1st September the High Court in London rejected a request from some major pension funds for a judicial review into the the Government’s plans to replace the RPI measure of inflation that is currently used to calculate pension increases by many pension schemes, including the NTL Pension Plan.
The Government plans to replace RPI with CPIH (similar to CPI but with housing costs included), but this index, like CPI itself is typically lower than RPI.
However the planned change is not currently expected until 2030 and a more immediate problem for pensioners is the current high level of inflation. Many schemes cap the level of RPI used for increases, ours being at 5%, which means that the real value of a pension is reduced in any year in which inflation (the annual RPI increase as at September in our case) exceeds this level. And such reductions persist and are never recovered in future years even if inflation subsequently falls below the cap level.
You can read more details on the High Court decision in many articles that can be found by Googling “pensions rpi”.