From the BBC:
The government is to say for the first time that it plans to link the public sector retirement age to the state pension age, which is to rise to 66. Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander is also due to confirm public sector pensions will be based on workers' average salaries...
He is expected to say most public sector workers - bar the army, police and fire service - will see their retirement age linked to the state pension age. But he will also say low paid public sector workers on less than £15,000 will not face any increase in pension contributions and those earning less than £18,000 will have their contributions capped at 1.5%...
And so on an so forth, nothing radical but the sort of thing which has long been blindingly obvious to everybody else.
Most of the time I'm pointing out what the UK government has got horribly wrong, so I suppose it's only fair to mention those rare occasions when it get something right. Normal service will be resumed in five minutes, no doubt.
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4 comments:
The unions seem to want to kick off big time about this. If they hadn't given all the money away in previous generous early retirement deals there might not be such as issue.
The other one is that if bond yields were a tad higher I don't think there would be such a big issue with funded schemes.
I can never understand why Unison et al never said anything about sterling depreciating so much, since the DB schemes they are so protective of ar denominated in it.
They want us to join in a 'day of rage' on 30th June. I think the old socialists that run it still hope to generate enough rage one day to propel them into Number 10.
Still waiting for a reply to my letter to Danny Alexander (sent last December, chased in March) enquiring as to whether he still believes MPs should take the lead on pensions reform and sacrifice their generous arrangements in favour of money purchase schemes.
He told me in earnest tones - just after he was appointed Lib Dim pensions spokesman - that he felt very strongly that they should. Mind you that was in early 2006 when he couldn't even have dreamed he might be in a position to do something about it so it was just duckspeak, you might say... and Jim Wallace, Tavish Scott, Alastair Carmichael and various other worthies all sat there nodding sagely as he said it.
They could short-circuit a good deal of Union antipathy if they did, I suspect, but MPs don't seem to like leading from the front. They're more attuned to leading from their subsidised, smoking-ban-exempt bars in the HoC.
"And so on an so forth, nothing radical but the sort of thing which has long been blindingly obvious to everybody else."
Indeed. And since the unions seem determined to die in a ditch this summer anyway, why not kill two birds with one stone?
They can't rely on public support to get favourable pension deals when everyone else has an anxious eye on their own future, after all.
SL, I will probably take a day off in protest at them going on strike. Or something.
FT, he's a busy man, send him a chasing email!
JM, exactly. Serwotka refers to the changes as "daylight robbery" which is a pretty good way of describing the present system from the taxpayers' point of view.
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