Pensions

It was an established principle that the rules of a pension scheme had to be construed in a purposive way in the sense of being given a meaning which respected the context in which the relevant rule had been drafted and the purpose it had been intended to achieve. There were no special rules of construction different from those which the courts routinely applied to all contractual documents. However, a pension scheme should be construed so to give a reasonable and practical effect to the scheme. The administration of a pension scheme fund was a complex matter and it seemed that it would be crying for the moon to expect the draftsman to have legislated exhaustively for every eventuality. It was necessary, therefore, to test competing permissible constructions of a pension scheme against the consequences they produced in practice. Technicality was to be avoided. If the consequences were impractical or over-restrictive or technical in practice, that was an indication that some other interpretation was the appropriate one.