I work in the public sector, I'd really like to know where this "gravy train" everyone goes on about is, I have yet to find it.

Please don't confuse underpaid junior civil servants & other crown/local government employees with the mandarins in Whitehall.

Its in the pension - even for low paid civil servants the pension is very good compaired to a private money purchase scheme

Sure, but that's to make up for the [LIFTED] salary we get compared to our private sector equivalents.

I'm assuming it was a bloke that answered then?

It'd be along these lines otherwise I reckon:

That largely depends on your definition of 'good'. It's better than the pension someone in a similar role in the private sector would get but that's largely because private sector pension schemes have been utterly pillaged over the last decade or so - both by the financial sector and by the government (Gordon Brown when he was chancellor, to be specific). The average public sector pension pays out something roughly equivalent to the minimum wage as a I recall, where the private sector average is about 4 grand less. Frankly, neither are what I'd describe as 'very good'. They're better than living in poverty but not much else.

I heard an interesting interview on this subject a while ago and the interviewee described it in the following way - to require the public sector pension schemes to be depreciated down to the level of private sector schemes is to argue for 'an equality of misery' for all of us in our old age. You could say public sector workers are better off, but it would equally be true to say that private sector workers are worse off. Why is apparently the only acceptable solution to hurt the public sector, rather than improve the private one? The logic that we 'can't afford' public sector pensions is true, on the assumption that everything we would rather spend the money on than it is more important. I don't believe that is true. Given a choice I'd say spend the money on hospitals before pensions, but do we really need new nuclear submarines? Should we really change the law to reduce corporate tax while taking more money from the pockets of the future elderly?

We can afford everything we need to pay for. The decision is not that. The decision is to decide what we need to pay for, and what we don't. In a civilised society giving people who have worked all their lives some comfort in their final years is not something that should be low down the priority list, regardless of where their pay slip comes from.

Having said all that, I have no issue with some of the reforms that have been suggested - I don't really see a problem with the vast majority of people working until they are 70, for example. We're not all doing manual labour any more. But the basic premise that the obvious 'fix' for the pension system is just to make the majority of people equally poor - well, can you see any politician getting elected if they put that in their manifesto?

Jon

Or jobs that nobody needs. So even if you are underpaid civil servant, maybe you have a job that shouldn't exist in the first place. We all know how "efficient" govermnents are with our money...

This isn't a dig by the way , that efficiency also extends to 'We tried to do it on the cheap before with agency workers, fired them, now we've got a backlog of work that would choke a donkey', as in my public sector workplace

There are undoubtedly going to be some areas where out of date working practices remain in the public sector. Heck, I'm sure there are in every sector, if you look hard enough. The problem is the proposed cuts are across the board, regardless of how deserving the case is. We may have too many people in council road planning departments (as a hypothetical case, I have no idea if that's the reality) but is anyone here going to hold their hand up and say we could do with a few less nurses? or policemen? Or primary school teachers?

The blanket proposition the 'the public sector is inefficient and it needs to be cut' without considering the resources required in reality in the various sectors is dogmatism at it's worst. What we need is the resources that we all use being funded and managed in an efficient manner and the posts we need to have the best people in being recompensed well so the best candidates apply. Not just cutting the PSBR down to the bone and handing anything that can show a profit over the the private sector. I'm always bemused that the statement 'we need to pay the best wages to attract the best people' seems to apply to merchant bankers but not to teachers in secondary schools.

As an example, here's an article from the register today. GCHQ are having terrible trouble keeping their internet boffins, because they all sod off to Google or Microsoft for three times the pay. Now much as I like MS and Google being around, very useful and all that, neither of them are going to help stop someone blowing the crap out of the Olympic stadium on opening night are they? So what do we do - pay them the 'going rate' and blow the budget, or pay them what the public sector can afford and risk some horrible nasty thing happening on our streets?

Not all public sector workers are shirking. Not all private sector workers are a model of efficiency (try ringing any major corporation customer support line for a start). The world is not black and white.

Jon

Yes but the private sector has been in a race to the bottom for years. They have been able to get away with it because it can be hidden until it is too late. The problem is that the pension firms have not been able to maintain investment returns of the past, along with every government since thatcher raiding pensions one way or another and inadequate provision being made to top them up pensions in the private sector are crap. Now the coalition want to put everyone else in the poor house so that the private sector do not look like they have done so badly. There are a number of solutions. Increasing the pension age and they need to do that much more rapidly than they have. It should be 70 as soon as possible. Then they need to switch to average salary schemes. Then all pension whether private or public need to have much higher contribution rates to top then up. There should be a minimum of 20% of salaries added to pensions annually. So teacher or shop workers should have to pay 10% of their salaries into a pension. Then companies should have one pension scheme. So all the staff including directors are getting the same benefits. If the fund is underfunded then directors suffer more than anyone else. Having separate pension schemes for directors should be illegal. All it does is mean that directors pension pots are filled at the expense of employees pensions.

Directors are employees too . However if you do that they're always going to destabilize the scheme because an average salary for a director is still going to be several times (in fact many times, as the internal disparity in company pay has significantly worsened in the last decade) that of the company average. So there is some logic to keeping director pension separate to company pensions. There are various ways you can 'protect' a company pension scheme against the excesses of the company executive. Most private sector companies didn't bother doing that, because the people making the decision about whether they should do that or not were the directors...
The simple solution is to follow the model used in large parts of Europe, where they manage to have pretty reasonable pensions without bankrupting the economy. Of course that does involve charging a certain level of taxation, not bailing out sociopathic financial institutions when they manage to blow their own brains out and not getting involved in idiotic wars in all the world's dustbowls.

Jon

There are plenty of private businesses that are badly run. I have worked in a number where things were run badly. It is that you just do not hear about them because it is hushed up and it is not our money that can be used as a justification of why we need to know. The non jobs that were created in recent years are a symptom of central funding. It is a matter of use it or lose it. If you are efficient and come under target they slash next years budget. A system of rolling over surpluses and these to be used before they are granted extra funds might actually encourage better management. Though any system will create a culture of how to get around it.

Who said anything like that. Ordinary pension schemes work with people having different salaries. Why should it be different with directors being forced into the same scheme? Each person gets a pension pot and if directors pay trebles then their contribution trebles. By having them all in the same pot you avoid incidents like Rover when the Phoenix directors had a £42 Million pound pension pot that was fully funded and the other employees had an underfunded scheme leaving many without pensions after years of service and government funds.