Makes my blood boil

GunJack

agarnett and muscle - you two really do take the week's "bitter and twisted" award..You think it's an easy life in the public sector? Wrong, in about 99.9% of cases....
Lower salaries, effective pay cuts (lower than inflation, if you did get one) over the last 10 or more years, far less job security due to all the government cutbacks, eroding of t&c's, pensions being eroded and changed for worse, more expensive deals, policy dictating you can't do the best for the public as you would want, I could go on and on....

Oh, and I was in the CS for 20 years, when gov't policy forced me, against my will and my sense of civic duty and service,into the private sector, doing a similar job for 20% higher salary, oh and a final salary DB pension scheme!! fancy that!!

So, I have 20 years of deferred CS pension, will have iro 20 yrs of private DB pension, and a higher salary in getting there...

Am I happier now than in the CS? No, I'm not, because I have a high sense of doing something for the public good (as I suspect a hell of a lot of public sector employees have, certainly all those I worked with had). I'm now doing a very similar job in the private sector which is costing the taxpayer way more than when I was doing it in the public sector, not least because there are two layers of corporate profit added to the (higher) cost of doing the job...

So, if I were you, I'd concentrate your ire on successive governments who are outsourcing so much that was done in-house in the wider public sector, at a higher cost for often the same or worse service, rather than the fact that some of us may have at least part of a reasonable pension for having put up with the !!!! that's aimed at us just for being in the public sector...

Oscar Alpha Oscar

Muscle750

I cant spell but can you weld?...............And on that note im off to bed

atush

Please do.

BobQ

Muscle750 wrote: »

Another prime example of Public sector greed is that at GCHQ they pay you £5 a day yes £25 a week or even £100 a month not to take your car to work, so what do most of them do clog up all the side roads nearby and walk the last few hundred yards, funny how nearly all the roads in the town centre have parking meters yet these roads dont. In one road alone the other day there were in excess of 40 cars, there are no houses and at 6pm every single car had gone.
Plus of course theres no over 55s because theyve all gone to sit down and put their feet up and took the money. Those that do go back on the monday after turning 55 take the pension on a friday and go back the following week doing the same job but with a different title

You are making this up: someone taking their pension at 55 gets it actuarially reduced if they return to work as a civil servant. Furthermore after retirement they cannot earn more than they previously earned less their pension in payment.

I suspect that if there is any truth in this they are resigning and then being employed as a contractor doing a similar job which I agree is wrong but not illegal.

BobQ

Muscle750 wrote: »

we are no further forward after a day and five pages of "input" however at least we can talk about it

I cannot be bothered.

You seem to be trolling or at least are just a reactionary UKIP supporter who hates immigrants and just about everyone else and belies everything you read in the Mail and Express.

I'm out too

Andy_L

chucknorris wrote: »

Nope, you've got it all wrong! I retired when I became a multi-millionaire at 42 (from building up from scratch and running two businesses, that I ran alongside working in the private sector). My salary as a chartered quantity surveyor in the private sector by then was my 3rd string income, that's why I retired so early. I entered the public sector 10 years after I retired from the private sector, because by then I had sold one business, and had some time on my hands, and I wanted to become a university lecturer and give something back to society. Although the public sector pension (of £10,600) that I have will come in handy, it pales into insignificance (less than 10%, so again very much 3rd string) when compared to all our other assets. We have paid much more tax than we have gained from me having a public sector pension.

EDIT: By the way, you are only showing yourself up insulting people with your keyboard, it lacks class.

Universities are actually part of the private sector

Kynthia

BobQ wrote: »

I cannot be bothered.

You seem to be trolling or at least are just a reactionary UKIP supporter who hates immigrants and just about everyone else and belies everything you read in the Mail and Express.

I'm out too

It's too scary to think that there are such bitter people out there who hate anyone who did well in life and have such nasty views about others, including immigrants and women (anyone who uses the term Doris is either ignorant or a misogynist). Logic and truth clearly aren't high on their list of priorities so it would almost be a relief to think they were trolls.

If your pension isn't going to meet your needs then either work somewhere with a better pension, pay more into your current pension, or earn more money so that more goes into your pension from you and your employer. Calling all civil/public servants parasites and slating anyone who earns well isn't going to make you any happier in retirement.

agarnett

Oh dear, Muscle750 has gone to bed, and frankly I don't blame him.

Clearly public sector has burgeoned and metamorphosed in horrible ways, and an overwhelming number still think they'll be drawing decent public sector funded pensions one way or the other for the duration of their hoped for long retirements, even moonlighting multi-millionaires with a finger in the pie on the side.

I guess that'll be the way for a while yet, but how long can we keep it up? Anyone done the math lately? That's the scary bit, Kynthia.

Good luck with counting on continuation of cloud cuckoo and all that!

p00hsticks

BobQ wrote: »

Someone who did "very well" might reach Permanent Secretary and run a Department like Work and Pensions. They might be paid £150K

£180k - £185k, apparently - Robert Deveraux is the current Permanent Secretary for DWP

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dwp-roles-and-salaries-september-2015

Salaries for senior Civil Servants are very transparent

chucknorris

Andy_L wrote: »

Universities are actually part of the private sector

Well 'techically' (see below) you have a point, but this thread is about public sector pensions, and the TPS (teachers pension scheme) is a public sector pension.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2006/jun/20/highereducation.comment :

Technically, the state still regards universities as private sector. They must comply with all the rules that control private bodies. There are a myriad of obscure accounting standards and an irresistible enthusiasm on behalf of various bodies to ensure we fill up our annual reports with increasingly dull and worthy statements of no relevance to our core activities of teaching and research.

Has anyone actually looked at the sort of tendentious twaddle that now goes on for page after page in a university's annual report and accounts? Here is a confession: I have never, ever, read all the text in the annual report. And a prediction: neither has anyone else. It is the ultimate vanity publication. There are no shareholders whose investment might be at risk, yet we must follow the trappings of the private sector even if they are as irrelevant as they are tedious.

So perhaps universities are really in the public sector?

I can certainly tell you that working for a university feels nothing like working in the private sector.

EDIT: The ironic thing about this thread for me, is that I actually agree that public sector pensions when looked at in isolation (i.e. ignoring the whole salary package) are over generous and probably in some cases a burden on the tax payer. But you can't expect individuals to not take what is on offer. The other side of the coin is that I am not financially better off than working in the private sector because the salary is much lower (lets just go with universities being in the public sector for the sake of argument for now). The thing is though that most people if they chose to, could work in the public sector and have a public sector pension.

I think the problem is that most people are ignorant about how much DB pensions are actually worth (including many of my colleagues) and people sometimes wake up to this later in life and realise that they had not taken these valuable pensions into consideration when they made their career choices. When I considered working as a lecturer, I worked out the value of the pension and realised that it made up for the shortfall in salary. The calculation was something like this:

1/60th salary = £713 pension earned (PA), which is worth a multiplier of about 28 when (this is subjective, it could ealiy be argued it is worth a multiplier of something like 33, but I use 28. 28 x £713 = £19,964 less the contribution of £4,364 (10.2% of salary, it used to be 6.4%, but lets stick with up to date figures) = £15,600 real term benefit (to me). As I said there is an element of subjectiveness about the selection of the multiplier) if someone used a multiplier of 33 the value would increase to £19,165. This is the type of calculation that people should use when comparing the salaries in public and private sector.