Comments on: Public sector pensions again

By: gigger

gigger — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:02:10 +0000

im 20 and so by the time I get anywhere even close to a retirement age there will be well and truly nothing left in the pot! my solution to this? dont bother with any of it! work hard spend hard, whats the point in earning a decent wage, putting loads of cash away for the future only to see it dwindle by the fund managers messing up the stock markets, and to be penalised for having over a certain amount of savings. My plan? WORK WORK WORK like everyone else, then spend spend spend, claim poverty at retirement age, sell the house and buy another underneath a flight path thus ensuring someone will eventually pay over the market rates for it to expand the airport, take a little job at the council, accidentally fall over an office plant and live the life of luxury on a 8million quid health & safety payout.

no1 better nick my plan innit

By: Robert Day

Robert Day — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 22:41:39 +0000

I’ve commented on another strand about pensions and won’t repeat those comments here. But if I can pick up some of the comments about the analysis of private vs. public sector wage levels: there is a generally held view in some quarters that recent years have seen a “public sector pay bonanza” (must have passed me by, but there you are). My experience has been that this has been mainly due to inflated salaries at middle and senior management levels to attract “the best talent” from the private sector!

This has two knock-on effects:

1) the money to pay for this comes from suppressing salaries lower down the food chain; and
2) these dynamic ex-private sector managers are the ones that then tend to come up with spiffing wheezes to save money, like not wasting time encrypting personal data when it’s going to leave the building, or using private sector couriers with an imperfect record on package delivery, or cutting overheads (staff) and then wondering why the Revenue (for instance) ends up with a million unanswered letters.

By: Nigel

Nigel — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 17:39:08 +0000

Of course people without pensions should be cross, but that resentment should be directed at those who have denied them pensions.

Low paid workers contribute to gold-plated directors’ pensions almost everytime they spend any money.

At least from 2012 everyone other than the very low paid will be enrolled into a pension with a compulsory employer contribution (unless they opt out.)

By: Peter Annison

Peter Annison — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:11:57 +0000

A further thought. People with no private pension, or just a small one, contribute through their taxes to the so-called gold plated pensions of the public sector.
This applies especially in the case of local authority pensions, which are the only funded public pension schemes, and where the employer’s contributions come out of the Council Tax. [Police and Fire Service pension contributions have also been collected via the Council Tax precept, but this has become so onerous that I understand the government has proposed moving the responsibility to the Treasury].
We thus have an unfair and fundamentally unjust situation where the private sector ‘pension poor’ are being required, via their Council Tax, to subsidise the public sector ‘pension rich’. A sort of inverted form of Robin Hoodism!