Can anyone with a decent archive of old handbooks please find me these answers?
1. Whether SERPS additions to IVB were still available in 1987/88?
2. If so, when they stopped being paid with IVB to someone eligible in 1987/88?
3. (This one's pushing it a bit) how to work out the amounts payable from 1987 onwards? Is it the same as in Chapter 19 of this year's CPAG? But surely the factors for earlier years would have been lower then, because the relevant inflation hadn't yet happened? (Yes, its an arrears matter).

Grateful for anything. I have a fairly clear recollection that SERPS could be added to IVB back then, but the oldest handbook in this workplace is 2002-3, and I certainly don't recall when it disappeared altogether.

Thanks to an ex-colleague with a collection of old Disability Rights Handbooks, I now know that SERPS was indeed payable with IVB in 1987/88, and continued to be payable until the introduction of IB in 1995.

But I'm still still after details of the calculation process for each year. I think they could be found in the Rights Guide to non means tested benefits (as was). Anyone?

Ruth T has emailed me to say she has the relevant books and is checking the figures for me. So if you were looking in your dusty glory hole for your old copies - you can stop now, thanks!

This may be of use for future reference.

www.ifs.org.uk/ff/ib.xls

A link to the above Institute for Fiscal Studies website - that has benefit rate information from 1939 to the opresent day - is also available in the benefit rates area of rightsnet (which itself can be accessed via the blue 'menu bar' at the top of every rightsnet page).

Unfortunately the IFS site doesn't have information about calculating SERPS additions.

But I've just about decided to abandon this investigation anyway - the extracts that Ruth T provided for me made it clear that even if arrears of SERPS additions were notionally payable to the client in this case, they would only be offset against the arrears she's aready had of REA. So no net gain (as the trawlerman said...)