Ex-miner Budget payment a 'long time coming'

Trustee Bleddyn Hancock said there was some bitterness towards the Budget announcement

Former miners who will see a 41% rise in their pension after years of campaigning have welcomed the move - but say some will "never" get to benefit from it.

Members of the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme (BCSSS) - which has been held by the government since 1994 - will receive £2.3bn, Rachel Reeves announced in Wednesday's Budget.

Trustee Bleddyn Hancock said it was hoped that 3,000 former mineworkers in Wales and their families would receive "several thousands of pounds" in backpay by Christmas.

While former miners have called the news a "long time coming", they say many colleagues are no longer alive not to receive it.

Former miner Mr Hancock said some "bitterness" remained following the announcement from those who felt the decision should have been made sooner.

He said: "It's been far too long and we don't see why it should have taken that long. However, we are still very pleased that the government has righted this awful injustice."

Last October, the government released money from the Mineworkers Pension Scheme (MPS) in its 2024 budget, but it remained frozen for those in the BCSSS alternative pension scheme.

Speaking on Thursday, Welsh Secretary Jo Stevens said 4,000 pensioners would now benefit from the announcement as a "historic injustice that we are righting".

Mr Hancock said 38,000 miners across the UK will benefit from the change, but that 2,500 pensioners had died since the MPS announcement.

"We've had to show them that we too, are mine workers. We worked underground and the majority of the women in the industry, they were in our scheme and they were the lowest paid in the industry," he said.

"So we turned on the narrative that somehow we were all wealthy mine owners and that in fact we were coal miners and ordinary workers."

Members of the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme will receive £2.3bn, the chancellor announced

Michael Davies, 86, worked in four different collieries across south Wales in a mining career spanning 25 years after he went "underground straight from school" at 15.

He said the news was a "long time coming" but would  "make a big difference to my life and my other colleagues, and especially the widowers left behind".

He said in Markham, Caerphilly, there had been about 50 officials but were now only about six left.

"That's very sad.

"It'll make a big difference, and make a nice Christmas," he added.

Roy Dunn, 76, from Nelson, Caerphilly, worked for about 17 years across Penallta Colliery near Hengoed and Tower Colliery in Rhondda Cynon Taf.

He called Wednesday's announcement "welcome news" but stressed that some older pensioners will "never" see the change.

He described it as a "long, hard fight".

Mr Dunn described this year's budget announcement as justice "up to a point".

"The average age of the people in this scheme is 80. That is sad. Why they have been denied this for so long? I just can't get my head around it."

Meanwhile, for other pensioners in Wales, Wednesday's budget announcement brought some good news - but not everything they have been campaigning for.

For years, former workers from a plant in Cardiff who lost their pensions when it went bust more than 20 years ago have called for surplus money to be used to compensate them.

While workers from Allied Steel and Wire (ASW) got 90% of their pensions back, that has been eroded because payments are not linked to rising prices.

Reeves said pensioners in situations like those at ASW will now be uprated with inflation "so that people whose pension schemes became insolvent no fault of their own, no longer lose out as a result of inflation".

Michael Davies, 86, worked in four different collieries across south Wales

John Benson, a campaigner and ASW worker of 41 years, said the pension announcement will see him receive less than £100 extra a month from 2027.

He said if he received his full pension indexation, he would be receiving "anything up to £250, £300 a month extra".

"It's taken 23 years out of my life fighting this. I go to bed at night, I think about it. I get up in the morning. I think about it. What have we done deserve this?

"We've done nothing wrong. We've played by the rules we were told to play by."

Mr Benson, 79, along with others, is calling for his pension indexation to be backdated, and said Reeves had "betrayed" trust he and others had put into Westminster.

Secretary of State Stevens said while the budget had delivered what was asked for in the former ASW worker's original campaign, recently the campaign "had changed slightly" in terms of calls around backdating.

She added the government had taken a "fair approach, looking at it in the round about what was available".