To think public sector DB pensions should be illegal

I did not know it was unfunded, that is outrageous.

But they don't work in jobs that are in the market.

They are not private sector roles, they are not market roles.

Is this genuine lack of understanding of the role of public servants, or deliberate misrepresentation from those who want to remove more of the state so there will be fewer state services for everyone in future?

It would be difficult but is doable, many private companies and many private schools have done it over the last 30 years. All new employees go onto the new scheme and a compensation agreement is worked on that freezes DB , moves to DC but in return there is a higher salary going forward, and a better quality pension that you could direct where you wanted and is yours to access/ direct

This assumes that many civil servants jobs won’t be taken by AI which I think is highly optimistic. In reality there will be significantly less in future paying for the pensions of the many , who are all living materially longer than they were. So instead of an average pension being paid for eg 7 years ( my grandparents) , it’s being paid for 20 - 30 years ( my parents generation)

No one is saying public sector workers don’t do a good job, but for that the6 should he5vpaid in the same way as everyone else, ie a market rate and a DC pension that they can choose how much or little to contribute to. With life expectancy having increased so much the pension could be a 30 year pension. So public sector worker works from 18-55 , ie 37 years, and then receives a pension at average salary for another 30 plus years. The country cannot afford it , we have less young people working,
The significant majority of private companies stopped their DB pensions decades ago. It is time the public sector aligned with the private sector, the only reason it hasn’t is every single government is frightened of what it will mean for them in terms of votes, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t the long term smart answer.

Most people dont have dependent children at this stage of life. Many do not have a spouse. There is no pot so nothing to pass on

Perhaps you should consider another way to think about it. Everyone - including public and private sector workers- through tax is paying for the public services which, while they do have significant problems, are still fantastic and look around at some of the rest of the world to see what it could be like elsewhere - both good and bad- we are doing pretty well. We are payig for services. Your post makes it sound like private sector workers are just paying to keep public sector workers in a job, but doesnt recognise the value of that job. Really poor. The vast majority of public sector workers work incredibly hard and often in very difficult circumstances

All this chat about ‘gold plated pensions’ etc overlooks one simple fact. If i have an NHS pension paying for example 20k/year for life, thats roughly equivalent to someone having a 500000 ‘pot’ which they can withdraw at say 4% which would give the same amount. That 500000 has grown to that level through years of growth and jnvestments and will be passed on to spouse, kids, whoever you choose when you die. In the NHS pension scheme you have no pot. Theres a survivor pension of approx half - 10k in this example- if you die. If no spouse - no one gets anything. You will have paid hundreds of thousands of contributions and there is no legacy from this. Thats fine if you live 20 years but if you only live 6 years its a pretty raw deal for your family. So if you want something to pass on you have to save for it separately. But you still have to pay up to 12.5% of your salary to get your NHS pension. Also in a private pension and drawdown arrangement, you can keep investing and growing the money, all through your life

It's not future taxpayer money, it's future pension contributions from future public sector employees. The DB pensions of retired civil servants are paid from the current civil servants pension deductions.

Switching over to DC would be hugely expensive. Currently there is no money pot - money in goes straight to money out but the government can confidently promise today's 30yo civil servant what their benefit will be in 40 years time because they can be confident that there will be civil servants in 40+ years time. DC pensions require actual money to be invested for those 40+ years so any kind of switchover would require decades in which current retired people still need their pensions paid but the current contributions of the not-yet-retired civil servants are all being invested for their own future pensions and you cannot spend the same money twice - so it would cost billions, that we simply do not have.

DC and DB pensions aren't a cut and dried case of one being better than the other. Depending on the global economy, some DC pensions end up being more generous than the same contributions into a DB scheme. The big difference is who takes the risk. For people in a DC scheme, if the markets crash when they are a year or so from retirement, the individual people of that age cohort suffer that blow as the value of their investment pot is wiped out. With a DB scheme the risk is spread and the impact is absorbed by the employer rather than the individuals, which is fairer. The fact that one by one all the private sector employers have decided to foist the risk onto their employees and make the system more unfair should not be a good reason for the government to do the same.

No they don't mean public sector pensions, they mean the state pension. And those which have employer contributions (under 20%, not 30%) aren't anything to do with the welfare bill.

The average private sector worker works twice as hard as those in the public sector. Not from my experience of working in central government, local government and in the private sector in similar roles.

Then we have all the time off, paid annual leave, early retirement clauses, duvet days, general laziness, and incompetence that is NEVER tolerated in the private sector. Oooh, we have "paid time off i.e. annual leave - legal requirement. Early retirement = reduced pension; the only services that have special early retirement clauses are armed forces & police which by the very nature of the job are much harder or even impossible to do when elderly. Never had a "duvet day", though I've heard about them happening in private industry. Laziness? I work VERY hard indeed, as do all my team. Incompetence? We can get sacked for that & I know people who have been - assuming they pass their probation period in the first place.

They had to increase our salaries the last few years just to keep us a few pennies above minimum wage at the lower grades.

...workers resigned their jobs on Friday, got massive redundancy pay outs and when back to the same job but with a different contract on the following Monday. Not possible. I know someone who retired then came straight back, but by definition if a role is made redundant you can't employ someone to do that same job the next day as the post no longer exists.

Try reading up on the facts next time!

My pension is coming to me in exactly 15 days. A good lump sum and a lovely monthly income. I will keep paying into another private pension l have, drawing on that when l am 65 yrs old. I know l have earned every penny, working xmas days, & all the other bank holidays. Unlike the private sector, me and my colleagues are not able to strike, we just get on with things that are thrown our way, we have little to bargain with. But my time is coming to an end & l have loved my job & hope l have helped alot of people over the years.

Funded DB schemes are brilliant.

Thats not what unfunded means.

Your public DB pension is an unfunded future obligation.

Your contributions in an unfunded DB pension do not go into a pension pot, they go to current pensioners.

In a funded public DB pension system, there is a core fund of usually some billions. The contributions from current employees go in, the pension payments for current retirees go out, the actuaries then calculate if the core fund is in surplus or deficit to meet the future pension payments of current employees given the portfolio, projections, and so on and then the government usually tops up any deficit from general taxation or scrapes away any surplus to use elsewhere annually.

Most private UK DB schemes are now in surplus, which is why a lot of them are now investing in insurance contracts.

Yes this is what I'm saying - the OP is confused - no government is prevented from changing the law going forward, or from changing policy going forward. But every government is always bound by the contracts signed in the past.

Where do you get the notion that the government is funding the LGPS scheme? They are not. Many people pay in for many years and get very little out on retirement. There's not some pot of free gold handed over on your last day of work. The scheme changes all the time and everytime it changes, it is far less favourable for those yet to draw their pension. State pension is the same amount every four weeks for the rest of your life plus annual raises, we paid in for that too, its not free. At 65 for those eligible to retire then, there's not going to be another 25 years left or even 20 for most retirees to live a heady lifestyle on the fruits of our working lives Pensions in this country are poor compared with orher similar countries and don't forget, public sector pay is poor and well below the national average for a lot of people in the sector. So before you get all righteous about the LGPS, don't forget, we have paid in and get very little out plus of course your outrage at the scheme and recipients can be appeased by the fact that most of us receiving paultry benefits will be dead soon and the next batch of local government retirees won't even have as much as we received. On the other hand, benefit claimants who choose not to work will be burdening this country and successive govermnents for generations to come, try being outraged at that.

The difference between GDST and state schools is that in the latter the 28% employer pension contribuiton is calculated into the funding. In April this is set to reduce to 17% or so but the funding will be reduced in recogniton of this. The GDST had to pay the 28% from their own income so they had the flexibility to be flexible.

The employer and employee contributions are calculated to that this pay s teachers already taking their pensions. If teachers had, say, a scheme where their 10% contribution was matched with even 8% along with a 5% pay uplift then the vast majority of the funds that were being used to pay retired teachers' promised pensions would have to replaced with further tax or borrowing for a few decades.

You're right, I suspect, that teachers would not be unhappy with a relatively generous DC scheme and small pay uplift but the treasury might not be so keen.

Yes, l can voucher for that. I pay alot every month into my pension pot.

Why is everything about pensions about the lowest common denominator? Businesses used to fund good pensions. I’ve gone without wages and stood on the picket line, not just for my pension, but for those who follow me. What have you done for yours?

They should pay a fair rate for a fair days work.

I don’t believe this is true. The GDST moved all their staff out of the TPS into DC pensions, while increasing pay and increasing flexibility as to what you could do with your pension. While the NUT campaigned hard against the change , it was ultimately voted through and the schools have not seen any drop in recruitment since . TPS is DB but is not as flexible for anyone outside the norm eg unmarried, no children etc as a well constructed DC scheme

Db pensions need to stop. Private companies generally stopped them years ago due to their huge indubded liabilities making them totally unaffordable. This needs to be stopped but unfortunately no govt of any persuasion has the balls to do it! So all reeves’ attack on pensions hits only private sector. It’s a scandal

Totally agree with this , the general public working in private sector is currently being asked to pay twice over for public sector workers. As the OP rightly points out the debt that exists to meet the pensions of public sector workers runs into trillions and is mostly unfunded ie there is no money to pay it unless you tax today’s workers even more . But worse than that there is almost no recognition by today’s public sector workers of the current day value of their pension entitlement so we are also faced with striking public sector workers because they “aren’t paid a market salary”. However if you valued the pension they will receive in the future their current salary is a multiple higher . The government would be far better to move all new entrants into DC , then plan to move all those inDB across to DC with some recompense , and eliminate both the pay gap and the unfunded liability. Not toiling be easy but it is probably our counties biggest problem long term.

So bad pay, no job security and pension taken off them - guess you don't want anybody working in the civil service

Wow. Do you believe what you've just written?