Reform UK MPs Benefit from “Gold-Plated” Public Pensions While Party Calls for Their End

All Reform UK members of Parliament—including party leader Nigel Farage, deputy leader Richard Tice and former cabinet minister Robert Jenrick—are enrolled in the parliamentary defined-benefit (DB) pension scheme, according to a Freedom of Information request to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA). The request also shows that every Reform MP participates, while only 13 MPs across all parties have opted out (eight Labour and five Conservative).

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Most public-sector employees, including MPs, can join DB schemes that guarantee a lifelong income, a feature now rare in the private sector. The party has pledged to close the local government pension scheme (LGPS) to new entrants and to review other DB arrangements.

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Under the scheme, MPs accrue an annual pension entitlement equal to 1/51 of their salary, contributing 11 % of pay. For a backbench MP earning the basic salary of £98,599, this translates to a guaranteed pension of roughly £10,000 per year after retirement. The LGPS alone covers about 6.9 million members in England and Wales and was estimated to cost taxpayers £56 billion in the previous year.

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Reform has not answered IPSA’s questions about whether its own MPs might opt out or whether the parliamentary scheme will be part of its broader review. Union leaders have labelled the party’s stance hypocritical. George Georgiou of the GMB Union described the attacks on local-authority pensions as “a low blow.” Pensions expert Tom McPhail argued that Reform should first reform the MPs’ scheme as a precondition for any wider changes, calling failure to do so “rank hypocrisy.”

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Reform plans to bar new entrants to all public-sector DB schemes from 2030, while existing workers would retain current benefits. A Policy Exchange paper estimates that shifting to defined-contribution schemes would generate a short-term Treasury cost of £3.4 billion six years after implementation, but could yield long-term savings of £37.4 billion per year fifty years later. The Labour government has so far rejected reforms, and the proposal has provoked strike threats from unions such as the firefighters’ union.

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