On Channel 4 News last night there was a head-to-head between Paul McKeever, chairman of the policemen's 'trade union' and some smart alec from Policy Exchange.
Mr K made the point that the police budget was the last place the government should be looking to make cuts. He pointed out, see also report in The Telegraph, that our budget for foreign aid is set to rise to about £12 billion a year, all of which is wasted and no business of the government anyway, and the police budget is set to be cut to about £12 billion a year (see page 2 of this), so whatever niggles we might have with policing - and we have many - it is incredibly good value for money and one of the core and irreducible functions of the state. Our net contributions to the EU are also something in the order of £12 billion a year as it happens.
Policy wonk chatted merrily about the Winsor Report, whatever that is, and his best shot was to point out that £1 in £7 of the police budget was spent on police pensions.
So what?
If you have a budget of £12 billion, and three-quarters is spent on wages, you can either pay it all out as current salaries without a service pension, or you can pay lower current salaries to serving police officers but promise (and pay) them a pension as well, as a kind of deferred pay. While police pensions, at about 50% of average salary after thirty years service, seem incredibly generous, that is balanced out by the fact that starting salaries are pretty low.
Quite what people's time preferences are, we do not know, but it is likely that it is as broad as long - if the police pensions were stopped for new recruits, then as like as not, they'd demand higher current salaries instead, so it would all even out.
Thursday, 17 May 2012
Copper makes good point: shock
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9 comments:
"...or you can pay lower current salaries to serving police officers but promise (and pay) them a pension as well, as a kind of deferred pay..." That is precisely how pensions are defined - 'deferred pay'.
In every good pensions manual I have ever read, they have always been defined thusly.
As to cost, 1/3 of the police budget in my area goes on police pensions. Which seems about right given their accrual rate and level of benefits. Whether it is 'fair' or 'good value' or not, is a separate issue.
I wonder just why the pols are so keen to give £12bn of our money to pols in other countries. Is it just for the appearance of benevolence, or the opportunities for junketing? OTOH much of this "aid" could be the gov't buying overpriced stuff from their mates in industry and dumping it on the Third World.
It's bizarre that we know these things but they appear to either have no clue or have an agenda.
I'm sceptical of the claim that cop salaries are low. It's a job-for-life that doesn't require any particular qualifications. NSW cop salaries are about 2/3 those in the UK, despite Australian working class salaries generally being higher, and NSW cops don't seem any more inept and useless than UK ones.
And foreign aid doesn't go to politicians. It did during the Cold War era, when the point of 'foreign aid' was to bribe our favourite evil dictator to buy our guns and use them to fight the Russians' favourite evil rebel army (or vice versa, depending on who was nominally in charge at the time).
Now, it goes to *specific projects*. All of which are published on the DfID website and evaluated. And which do, actually, have measurable positive outcomes.
You can completely legitimately say "well, fuck foreigners, I don't care if they starve, it's not my problem". But you can't say "aid doesn't work", because that's a factually untrue statement.
"And which do, actually, have measurable positive outcomes."
Quite possibly so, but that still doesn't explain why we are giving £23M to China and £1.2Bn to India, both very rich countries (although with huge disparities of wealth). Shouldn't they be looking after their own citizens? Also should we really be contributing 6% of the GDP of Congo and 7% of the GDP of Mozambique? These aren't British ex-colonies, so it's not even as if we did well out of them in the past. OK Sierra Leone is an ex-colony, but having 15% of its GDP made up from aid would make it a fakecharity, if it was a charity. Fakesovereignstate?
JB, the DFIF website is a load of waffle as far as I can see. I do care a lot if people starve, but aid payments are clearly not the way, we've been doing this for half a century in Africa and it has achieved nothing. And let's not niggle about the police budget, it's certainly not the place for making big savings.
B, I didn't know that. There's a splendid table here.
Mark, thanks for that link. I now know that the UK ranks third in the world for percentage of population that is fat and that our debt, as a percent of GDP, is less than Germany's. Also that Japan's debt is second only to Zimbabwe's.
I still think that foreign "aid" is mainly a vehicle for channelling public money into (British) private pockets, positive outcomes or not.
Mark: did you not even read my last comment? "Aid" didn't work when it was about bribing dictators not to be communist. Now that it's about setting up vaccination programmes, teaching girls to read, and all the other projects individually listed on the DfID site, it does.
JB, I did read it, I clicked through to the DFID site and saw lists and lists of waffle. And aid is clearly not working on Haiti (which is actually a lack-of-LVT problem).
Even if it is true that they are doing useful wholesome stuff, then what's the point of vaccinating people if it just means that more people will be killed in the next civil war/famine? What's the point of trying to teach girls to read if the idiots in that country don't want girls to read (like Afghanistan but probably dozens of others)?
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