UK - British Airways cabin crew have voted to accept the pensions deal that was negotiated at the start of the year, a union says.

The Transport and General Workers' Union said staff had voted by a 76% majority to accept the deal hammered out at the end of January.

It means the 11,000 crew have now endorsed the 18.75% rise in their pensionable pay figure and accepted changes to help deal with the £2.1bn at airline's New Airlines Pension Scheme, the union added.

"This is a good result for our members, BA and the travelling public," said Jack Dromey, T&G deputy general secretary, who was also in the talks.

"The new era of respect for cabin crew is established and we welcome the direct involvement cabin crew representatives will now have with [BA CEO] Willie Walsh."

The airline said in February that it had reached agreement with the trustees of the NAPS over a funding plan to handle the scheme deficit.

The plan, agreed in principle with the trustees last year, includes annual company contributions of some £280m for the next 10 years and a one-off cash injection of £800m.

Elsewhere, supermarket group Tesco said its pensions situation had benefited both from the A-Day changes and rising bond yields.

A-Day had enabled members of its main UK defined benefit scheme to gain additional pension flexibility. This altered scheme assumptions and resulted in reduction of the future liability by a total of £258m pre-tax. It also reported that its IAS19 pension deficit was cut to £670m.

And higher bond yields during 2006/7 means that the IFRS pensions charge for the current year is expected to decrease by around £100m.

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