300,000 jobs in public sector face the axe

Smallfries

I think a lot of people on here are misguided. freezing civil servant recruitment is one thing, you want to make them redundant. the reason they get a good salary is that most of the civil servant wages are crap, i admit, i am a civil servant and am not at all well paid for the job i do but i know that i will be ok in retirement and my kids/family will be ok if i die in service. the pension isnt as brilliant as it once was. the civil service has a lot of consultants that need getting shut off before the staff. i know i will properly get abuse for this posting, i know the country needs to make savings although every one sees public sector as an easy target and its not as simple as that

marklv

CLAPTON wrote: »

some-one saving 20% of their 30k salary for 40 years would end up with

20% x 30k x 40 = £240,000
you would need to add a bit for compound interest on the savings but equally its unlikely that some-one would start on 30k salary 40 years ago
so the total is likely to be a lot less
also Im not sure how many people save 20% of their salary each and every year of their life

Nonsense, because investing even in something as boring as bonds would get a return higher than inflation, which, when compounded, and even taking account of inflation, would probably double or even treble the amount quoted by you.

marklv

Smallfries wrote: »

I think a lot of people on here are misguided. freezing civil servant recruitment is one thing, you want to make them redundant. the reason they get a good salary is that most of the civil servant wages are crap, i admit, i am a civil servant and am not at all well paid for the job i do but i know that i will be ok in retirement and my kids/family will be ok if i die in service. the pension isnt as brilliant as it once was. the civil service has a lot of consultants that need getting shut off before the staff. i know i will properly get abuse for this posting, i know the country needs to make savings although every one sees public sector as an easy target and its not as simple as that

True. I have seen incredible amounts of money spent on bespoke suited !!!!!! from Deloittes, Accenture and other firms. These people have the gift of the gab and worm their way into every organisation they can, and then con them into paying them megabucks for largely unnecessary work that is explained by the consultants as being of critical business importance.

Smallfries

but i also accept i havent worked in every civil service office, there could be offices where they do have too many staff, i havent worked in an office like that i must say. people might forget that if you slash the number of court staff for example then you wait longer to sue someone as there will be less court clerks, ushers, office staff that process the work. prisons will stay full as trials will be affected and the waiting time will get longer etc. but the money needs to be saved somewhere i guess

marklv

donaldtramp wrote: »

Not envious in the slightest:p. I'm very happy with my remuneraration and pension.:beer:
I am sick of paying for others for doing non-jobs who recieve unfair pension contributions at the expense of others.
That is a HUGE difference.

And I am sick of busybodies like you not minding their own bl**dy business. :mad:

Smallfries

what non jobs do you refer to Donaldtramp?

marklv

Smallfries wrote: »

but i also accept i havent worked in every civil service office, there could be offices where they do have too many staff, i havent worked in an office like that i must say. people might forget that if you slash the number of court staff for example then you wait longer to sue someone as there will be less court clerks, ushers, office staff that process the work. prisons will stay full as trials will be affected and the waiting time will get longer etc. but the money needs to be saved somewhere i guess

You get too many staff in many private sector organisations as well. I used to work for a large IT services company that seemed to have 20% of the workforce permanently 'on the bench' but could not afford to get rid of them in case critical new projects were won.

thescouselander

princeofpounds wrote: »

Firstly, you seem to be implying that I have somehow chosen unfavourable statistics in order to misrepresent the situation. I can assure you I have done nothing of the sort. I specifically selected the NHS as it is the largest employer in the country, and I could have made everything look a lot worse by showing you the calculations for the military or the police who get both earlier retirement and high %

It turns out that selecting 'special class' or not makes no difference to the calculation. I thought about selecting it because an annuity at age 55 is FAR more expensive than one at 60 and only available for special classes, but thought that would actually be too unfair to the calculation and so if anything I was being more favourable to the public liability, not less.

The annuity rates are public and the salary was not unreasonable being close to the average public sector level.

Really, I'm not interested in this debate from the point of view of bashing the public sector. I like a lot of the public sector. I support the NHS. I don't even have a problem with public workers getting good pensions. The only thing I care about is that everything is managed well and responsibly, and public pensions is one area that simply has not been.

Secondly, most of the pension liabilities that have been built up in the system are from 'old-style' public pensions, so it makes perfect sense to consider them as they are the bills that need to be paid. Some public schemes have been reformed recently, but that doesn't dig us out of the hole, it just stops us digging quite so quickly.

Thirdly, someone has raised the issues of contributions compounding to help build up this great pension pot. I hate to shatter their bubble, but contributory pensions are a very recent thing for the public sector over the timescales that matter for pensions. The only 'shining' example of this are the councils, who made the move much earlier and as a result only have a (from memory) £300m deficit.

Let's take the NHS as an example. You can see from page 30 of their accounts that the equity of the fund is MINUS £199 billion. That's net of any assets in the fund. So there isn't anything significant propping this up except for the promise of future tax money. I'm going to be really rough here, but assuming there are 30m workers in the UK they will each have to pay 6600 pounds to fill that hole.

http://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/Pensions/Documents/Pensions/266_HC_486_NHS_Pension.pdf

If I have the time i'll return to the issue of contributions in a bit more detail later

Yes but if you go digging back to pre 95 arrangements you need to compare that with the private final salary arrangements available at the time. What is the point of comparing private pensions of today with public sector pensions of more than 15 years ago?

It would certainly not be appropriate to compare military pensions with other pensions as that is a special case.

Surly it would be better to look at something like the PCSPS which has already undergone reform in the last few years and is due to be completely changed in 2013.

lostinrates

marklv wrote: »

And I am sick of busybodies like you not minding their own bl**dy business. :mad:

The public sector is pretty much everyone's business. Its failure becomes the failure of the country, much in the way many people argue the banks, as private sector should not have done. Likewise the success of the public sector is our success. Fundamentally the public sector enacts the politics we vote for, the taxes we pay, or seek not to pay. It seems to me the ''public sector'' should be seeking to engage with all of us, all tax payers - whether in their employ or not, not seeking to tell us to ''mind our own business''. Its not really a terribly convincing argument.

princeofpounds

Yes but if you go digging back to pre 95 arrangements you need to compare that with the private final salary arrangements available at the time. What is the point of comparing private pensions of today with public sector pensions of more than 15 years ago?

I wasn't comparing it to private sector pensions. I was working out the absolute cost.

Frankly the private sector pensions of the past were also unmanageable, but they moved a lot quicker to reform. But they have nothign to do with my point.