Public Sector Pension Strikes – A JOKE !

Moby

BobQ wrote: »

Getting what you pay for is true of all organisations as is those who stay doing more work as their colleagues leave.

The abuse levied at public service workers on here, sometimes misses the point that the original objectives of offerring a good pension in both the private and public sectors was to encourage loyalty and enable the organisation to pay below market rates. These days loyality is not rewarded very much.

There are many jobs where its no longer necessary to incentivise people this way. The skills required to work in clerical and admin roles, to manage people finances etc are not that different in any job and its relatively easy to recruit for vacancies and little training is needed.

Where the public sector will lose out if it goes too far on the pensions changes is in jobs that benefit from significant experience such as teaching, scientific research, paramedics, nursing. The public sector has a lot of these kinds of jobs (as does the private sector). Of course nobody is indespensible but when an experienced person leaves replacing them can take a significant learning curve.

The politicians like some of the mindless public do not understand this but if "they" make such changes, yes you will be better off using your skills in something like banking and accept that the rewards of teaching do not pay the bills or facilitate a good retirement.

In the nineties, politicians decided that we did not need as many nurses and doctors. When it became evident that we did, we could not just pop out and recruit them be had to bring in loads from other nations while we worked out how to replace the training facilities that we had closed and it took years to train enough skilled and experienced people.

Excellent post. I thnk you continually raise the level of this debate with your contributions.:T

J_i_m

Taken from the beeb:

Prime Minister David Cameron has written to colleagues, the Mail on Sunday reported, to say they cannot expect low-paid workers like nurses and dinner ladies to "take on a burden we are not prepared to assume for ourselves".

Rises planned over the next three years would see Cabinet ministers contributing 17.9% of their £69,000 salaries to get the same benefits - equivalent to an extra £4,000.

About blooming time as well! They'd still be significantly better off than the average joe anyway.

hugheskevi

The nature of final-salary schemes is that they are fantastic for long-serving individuals who have good pay progression. They are also good value for older members, though not the oldest members with long-service, who may be better-off if they leave the scheme and get CPI revaluation rather than increases in line with their frozen or very small pay increases at the moment.

But for many groups, they are much less good. Especially following the change to CPI, most schemes are not especially good value for young members who will leave early - even for people in their 30s the value is small if they know they are going to leave. The switch to CPI reduced the value of such a person's accrued pension by more than a third.

By way of a real example, take a 30 year Civil Servant in NUVOS (the scheme for people joining in the last few years). Assume they earn £40,000 so they are a very well paid Civil Servant [I use a high salary in the example as most claim it is the 'fat-cats' that do best from the pensions.]

That person accrues £920 of pension p/a, payable from 65, revalued by CPI and indexed by CPI. Using the calculator here, that pension accrual has a value of £4,956. The calculator seems to use a discount rate of about 5%, which is reasonable.

Next year, the person would pay £2,040 in pension contributions (a rate of 5.1%). Their contracted out rebate would be about £1,100 leaving the employer putting in £1,800 or about 4.5% of salary. That's a pretty poor contribution rate. The year after the member will be asked to put in £2,680, reducing the employer contribution to under 3% after allowing for the contracted-out rebate.

So whilst I strongly support the move to a career average scheme, I think the higher contributions across the board fail to address the reality that some members are getting employer contributions many times greater than other members, and some members are in schemes which they really should be giving serious consideration to opting-out of to get deferred member revaluation, or choosing DC schemes instead if they are available to get a much higher employer contribution. Simply applying the overall average employer contribution as the employer contribution for all members is a very naive approach.

Note, comparison made here here isn't perfect, as Added Pension isn't quite the same as NUVOS pension, eg, NUVOS will provide life insurance benefits. However, the differences are sufficiently minor that they would not make a significant difference, in my opinion

scooby75

Vicky496 wrote: »

There's a lot of nasty comments on here!

In my opinion the government will get what it pays for. If it wants to pay less for pensions and less for payroll that's fine as long as they don't mind a reduction in staff quality.

The contributing factor is though that staff are being cut as well. This means those of us that are left are being asked to do more and more, but for less/the same money. Moral is pretty low and with the public so against us how long will it be before all the decent staff give up and leave for the private sector?

My department recently advertised a job for which we got a total of 2 applicants, probably because the wage was insulting for the job advertised (20% lower than the second lowest advertised job nationwide), especially as statutory qualifications are required . From a team of 14 we are down to 5 staff. We can only just about complete the bare essentials of the service we provide and cannot hope to carry out other functions and service plans that we are supposed to.

Alas, the two applicants did not even have the statutory qualification needed so the post has been adandoned. Pay peanuts, get monkeys and the public will get the public sector services it deserves.

ILW

scooby75 wrote: »

My department recently advertised a job for which we got a total of 2 applicants, probably because the wage was insulting for the job advertised (20% lower than the second lowest advertised job nationwide), especially as statutory qualifications are required . From a team of 14 we are down to 5 staff. We can only just about complete the bare essentials of the service we provide and cannot hope to carry out other functions and service plans that we are supposed to.

Alas, the two applicants did not even have the statutory qualification needed so the post has been adandoned. Pay peanuts, get monkeys and the public will get the public sector services it deserves.

Should that not tell you something about how inefficient parts of the public sector were allowed to become.

hugheskevi

Should that not tell you something about how inefficient parts of the public sector were allowed to become.

As some areas can survive with less people that doesn't necessarily indicate they are more efficient.

I've had the misfortune to have to deal with HMRC recently about pension tax relief. The people I speak to have no idea what they are talking about (okay, it is a somewhat technical area, but their ignorance is concerning nonetheless given it is what they work on).

I'm up to about my 5th or 6th contact with them about a straightforward matter. Their telephone staff aren't up to it, but their technical specialists aren't available (apparently, calling early in the morning gives you the best chance of speaking to someone with expertise in the area). They often insist on dealing in writing, then letters take weeks to be responded to, and then the response is incorrect.

I don't doubt that they are using less people, but they certainly aren't more efficient :mad:

Andy_L

Turnbull2000 wrote: »

Don't the police get free travel to work too?

Yes
"All our police officers currently benefit from free travel on London Underground and buses. This is available seven days a week, whether you are on or off duty."

http://www.metpolicecareers.co.uk/newconstable/pay_and_benefits.html

However I believe that TFL cover the cost as they like the idea of coppers on their transport in case something kicks off

sheffield_lad

ILW wrote: »

Should that not tell you something about how inefficient parts of the public sector were allowed to become.

inefficencies all over the public sector, good examples around me are

two men come to empty the dog bin, one sits in the lorry while the other takes the bag out. This has not happened just once they do it every week.

The mobile library, parks outside the councillors (my neighbours), house, every Wednesday. I have NEVER seen anyone on it despite the driver and the other presumably a trained librarian on £30+ just sat their!!! Grrrrrrr

This is without touching the subject of why sickness levels are double that of the private sector.

ILW

hugheskevi wrote: »

As some areas can survive with less people that doesn't necessarily indicate they are more efficient.

I've had the misfortune to have to deal with HMRC recently about pension tax relief. The people I speak to have no idea what they are talking about (okay, it is a somewhat technical area, but their ignorance is concerning nonetheless given it is what they work on).

I'm up to about my 5th or 6th contact with them about a straightforward matter. Their telephone staff aren't up to it, but their technical specialists aren't available (apparently, calling early in the morning gives you the best chance of speaking to someone with expertise in the area). They often insist on dealing in writing, then letters take weeks to be responded to, and then the response is incorrect.

I don't doubt that they are using less people, but they certainly aren't more efficient :mad:

The example given sais that they had reduced staff by around 70% and were still just about getting the job done. I woulld suggest that a 50% reduction should have left things running pretty well. Makes you wonder how long thay have been running with twice as many people than needed to do the job.

little.red.one

Zelazny wrote: »

If they were all on £20k, I don't think anyone would be upset. The fact is that a policeman in the Met will start on more than £30k (no idea of other areas, but I doubt it's much lower).

I know a brand new teacher, just passed her teacher training and her first teaching job pays more than £28k.

It's not that people think that teachers, firefighters, police officers, etc don't deserve to be well paid, but it should be something that's worked towards. If they had a starting pay of £20k and worked up from there then there would be a lot less complaint, even if their salary increased a lot quicker than in other areas. I certainly do believe that a teacher who's good at their job and has been teaching for 20 years should be on bloody good money, but one that's literally just qualified should not be on more than the median wage.

I am a qualified nurse and midwife. I pay nearly £80 a year to the Nursing and Midwifery Council for the right to call myself a nurse and they can call in my portfolio at any time to check that I am up to date and work for the required number of hours each year / study the required number of hours each year.
I have been a nurse for *28* years and have worked in many different areas, building up a portfolio of expertise that I use in my current post.
My current NHS post is one where I work 4 days a week, term time only to fit in around the family (I don't get paid for the holidays like teachers do). The stress and responsibility of my job, where I hold a complex caseload and could be called to court at any time is not reflected in my pay by any stretch of the imagination.
Because the trust that I work for decided to ignore the Agenda for Change guidelines and the Union was toothless to help I was recruited on a newly qualified nurses' wage of just over £21K full time (£13K PTE). I have held other posts which had far less responsibility and attracted a senior nurse salary.
However I am a typical female health service worker who has taken a drop in salary and hours to fit around the family. This coupled with the very real cuts to the health service and fewer and fewer job options means that the trust can virtually pay what it likes and fill its posts.
Don't get me wrong - I love my job and I look forward to going to work each day which I know is very lucky. However I (and many others like me) are far from the public image of the wet behind the ears teacher walking into a £28K job or a fat cat coasting to retirement on a huge pension paid for by the public. I will get about £4K if I end my career on this salary.