I move:
That the Defence Forces (Pensions) (Amendment) (No. 4) Scheme, 1974, prepared by the Minister for Defence with the consent of the Minister for the Public Service under sections 2, 3 and 5 of the Defence Forces (Pensions) Act, 1932 and section 4 of the Defence Forces (Pensions) (Amendment) Act, 1938 and laid before the House on the 25th day of July, 1974 be confirmed.
The purpose of this scheme is to provide an alternative basis of calculation for the pensions of the widows of military officers who were not members of the contributory widows' pension scheme.
At present such widows receive flat-rate pensions which are the same for all widows of officers of a particular commissioned rank and which vary only from rank to rank. For other public service groups, the pensions payable to widows who do not benefit from contributory pension schemes are fixed at one-half of what the contributory pension would have been. The contributory pension is one-half of the employee's own pension which is directly based on his pay and service and, accordingly, both types of pension vary directly according to pay and service.
It is desirable to bring these flat-rate pensions into line with the pensions of other public service widows as regards varying the amount according to service. There are many difficulties in doing this within the framework of the Defence Forces pensions code since an officer's retired pay, while changing according to service and rank, is not directly pay-and-service related. The basis now proposed is to calculate the pension of a military officer's widow by applying an appropriate percentage for each rank to the retired pay which would be payable to her husband if he were alive on the 1st July, 1974.
The flat-rates, inclusive of the 1974 budget increases, are being retained to provide a floor for these payments. At the maximum of the retired pay scales the percentages provide modest improvements in these pensions. I commend the scheme to the House.