from the 'what an insult' thread

"Some may challenge, with good reason, his intellectual bandwidth".

as someone with a professional interest in these things, it's worth making the following points:
- Public sector workers will still get a significantly better pension than many in the private sector, one which is linked to their earnings not the performance of the stock market.
- No-one will lose any "accrued rights" - i.e. benefits they have already gained
- the "working longer" bit means that public sector workers will have to wait till 65 (and the state-retirement age once that increases) to draw their pension - same as all non-public sector workers.

I am a great supporter of proper, affordable pension arrangements which give people a decent income in retirement. I can't see anything in these rather mild reforms that justifies the two posts above

Apologies btw - I'm posting this having only read the 27 recommendations of the report, not the full report itself, but I'm not basing my comments on hysterical reporting from either side of the political spectrum

I've worked in the private sector, the voluntary sector and am currently employed in the public sector.

In general, I find that many of my colleagues can't discuss this topic without sounding like rather spoiled brats. Many of them have no idea of what it is like to work in an environment where terms and conditions for employees are not particularly generous.

It's tiresome to hear folk whingeing about the 'moral' position on public sector cuts, seemingly unaware that there is also a moral position to passing a huge national debt on to your grandchildren's children.

bastion of all that is good and moral about the private sector - Mr Fred Goodwin - has taken out a 'super-injunction' to prevent newspapers referring to him as a banker. Funny, that wan't the word I was thinking of using. Similar though.

When I joined then public sector, I left a rather better private pension scheme.

Now, apparently, my not-quite-as-good public sector pension scheme must be taken from me because private sector bankers have arsed up the economy (though they themselves still get enormous bonuses).

I think I'm justified in being pissed off.

If we are living longer why shouldn't we work longer? Surely, regardless of political persuasion, this is simple maths. My understanding is that the state pension is paid from the tax/NI of those who are working, not from an investment fund. The money for pensions and increased health services has to come from somewhere surely?

the fact that running a public sector body these days demands that the senior incumbents are paid fat cat salaries in order to compete with their trough feeding counterparts in the private sector - apparently this is to ensure that the public sector attracts "the very best people" - then it's only fair that the minions under them enjoy the same sense of disbelief at their lot as those in the private sector.

... the director general of the CBI, John Cridland, claimed that the gap between public sector pension contributions and the eventual cost of those pensions is £10 billion per annum ... (borne by the taxpayer).
I don't necessarily trust him on that figure, I'd have to see the sum verified elsewhere, but let's go with Mr C's assertion for the moment.
A quick Google shows that estimated total government spending for this year is around £681 billion although there seems to be a consensus that this is too much - the Coalition wants to make cuts, Labour would also make cuts, just more slowly.
I'd hazard the wacky opinion that finding £10 billion in among all this to put towards public sector pensions is really a matter of political will - raise taxes, or cut £10 billion elsewhere* and use that. There will be an assertion that we could dump Trident and/or cut defence spending, although the sum we're talking about would be getting on for 25% for the total annual defence budget, and that's quite a 'rationalisation'. Troops out of Afghanistan? Troops out of Aldershot as well.
It would probably only be a short term solution anyway as the core of Cridland's assertion is correct - there is a shortfall between the contributions of public sector staff and the pension benefits they eventually receive, made up by taxpayers. In the future, there will be a growing squeeze on this arrangement as the proportion of oldies in the population grows (me, other Word readers in their 40s and 50s) while the proportion of working age taxpayers shrinks.

* Note: biggest spending government departments: Health; Work & Pensions; Children, Schools & Families.

Even pensions & life insurance firms have reined in pension arrangements for their own staff in the last decade and more, as they realised these arrangements would cost them far too much in the future because we're living too long.
One firm i know of used to pay 1/60th of final salary as a pension for every year of service completed between the ages of 20 and 60, with 60 being the retirement age ...
So go to university, get your first job, build up some experience, move to this company age 30 say, then stay for 30 years ... (Given the firm was a prudent old institution, filled with Scottish actuaries, this was not unusual.)
At 60, you would retire on half your final salary - 30/60ths - payable until you popped your clogs (state pension on top from 65). It's quite possible that you could now survive for another 25 years, til 85, which effectively means that the company has a non-productive, retired member of staff, at home, being rewarded for 30 years' service by being paid a 'wage' for doing nothing at all for another 25 years. (For the bloke who went there to work at 24, then left at 29, but was part of the pension scheme, he'll be entitled to 5/60ths, or 1/12th, of his final salary as a pension when he hits 60 .... Even if he left in 1993 and was earning £12k at the time, that's still an extra grand a year from the firm, until death do us part, after his 60th birthday.)
Of course the taxpayers don't pay for this - the customers (increased prices, reduced benefits) and the shareholders (reduced dividends) of the life insurance/pensions company pay instead. But in all cases, the money has to come from somewhere.
If management lets the situation get out of hand then you have problems like British Airways. As far as I know, despite some accounting sleight of hand, BA's pension fund deficit is still bigger than its annual turnover, effectively making it a pensions liability with some airplanes attached.

Every body keeps looking back and thinking they should be able to retire at 50, 55; 60. Every body has to accept, (and that includes police officers and fire fighters)that those days are gone. We are generally fit enough to work longer and we shall have to. Public or private sector. It is probably time companys and public bodies got out of the pensions game. The individual sorts it out. This is nothing to do with bankers, the government or the England cricket team. Its just how life has panned out.(55 and counting)

I've just got hold of a book titled Pillaged! by David Craig.

Craig asserts that every working day £413 million is taken from savings, investments and pensions by those people supposedly managing them for us. That's around £6:50 / day for every man, woman and child in theses isles. It adds up to £105 billion / year. Do we see any value being added to our savings and pensions for this handsomely rewarded work? No, many of us see that the value of our assets has decreased before you even start to account for its real value against inflation.

This is not about just bankers' bonuses, its the day to day fees we pay.The commissions they say are small - only 2 or 3%, but have a cumulative effect.

These people are supposed to be working to make our money grow. They do, but for their own benefit not ours.

I decided on a couple of occasions to increase my pension contributions and the last time I did I was horrified to see that the following year my pensions value had fallen by I think £15,000 even though I had paid in over £6000 more in the intervening period.

Another example - a work colleague retired 18 months ago at the age of 64.
His pension was considerably less than he would have got when he first thought of retiring at 62.

My OP wasn't posted as a points scoring excercise. The reason I posted was because of the simplistic summary that we all need to work longer for smaller pensions. There needs to be some work done to safeguard pension savings from the Financial whizz kids who invest them on the wrong horse and end up costing us thousands.

Might have the occasional blip but, over time, there's no substitute for bricks 'n' mortar.