The UK Supreme Court has held that a Northern Irish woman who was refused payments from her deceased partner’s pension is entitled to the benefit of a survivor’s pension. The 5-judge court unanimously found that the requirements under Northern Ireland’s local government pension scheme regulations had a discriminatory effect on the applicant as an unmarried cohabitee, and was unlawful under the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention).
The applicant, Denise Brewster, lived with her partner in Derry for 10 years – he died unexpectedly two days after their engagement. Ms Brewster’s partner had worked for the public transport service Translink for 15 years and paid into Northern Ireland’s local government pension scheme. The regulations under which the scheme operated provided for the payment of pensions to members and to certain survivors which, as of 2009, included a cohabiting surviving partner. However, the regulations required members to formally nominate cohabiting partners before they became eligible for survivors’ pensions; this nomination had not been made for Ms Brewster and as such, she was ineligible under the scheme.
Lord Kerr delivered judgment for the Supreme Court in considering the question of whether the nomination requirement under the pension scheme Regulations breached Article 14 (prohibition discrimination in application of human rights law) and Article 1 (guaranteeing peaceful enjoyment of possession) of Protocol 1 of the Convention. It was held that a pension is a possession under Article 1 and that the Court had to consider whether the interference with the applicant’s Article 1 rights was objectively justified.
The Court accepted that the objective of the regulations was to remove unwarranted difference in treatment between longstanding cohabitees and married couples under the pension scheme, and that the objective of the nomination requirement was to establish the existence of a cohabiting relationship equivalent to marriage. However, it was held that the regulations already required a surviving partner to establish that there was a genuine and subsisting relationship. Here, the relevant government department’s attempts to justify the requirement were not supported by concrete evidence, leading to Lord Kerr finding that its limitation on the applicant’s Convention rights and its discriminatory effect could not be justified.
The decision brings Northern Ireland’s public pension scheme in line with the rest of the UK with regard to cohabiting couples.
Click here for the full judgment in Re Denise Brewster.