To think public sector DB pensions should be illegal

I expect most of them do. They do 30 years and retire in their early 50s usually.

Totally agree. My FIL has received his index linked, final salary police pension for longer than he actually worked in the job!

Maybe try see it as buying a company and buying its debt too. It’s not that hard.

I agree with you. When politicians talk about the massive welfare bill, they mean pensions. And what they don’t mean is private sector pensions which are miserly & which it’s your money.

no, what they mean is whopping public sector pensions with their 30% employer contributions. All paid by private sector workers who NEVER receive the same benefits or job security.

And before we get to job descriptions. The average private sector worker works twice as hard as those in the public sector.

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.

It’s practicality impossible to sack a public sector worker, have 100% job security, backed up by unions.

Then we get to actual salary. Public sector roles have massively increased their salaries in the past 2 decades. Now it’s the public sector who is paying whopping salaries (think council workers, NHS managers, etc) and it’s the private sector on minimum wage and zero hours contracts.

In fact the government had to clamp down on public sector abuse by workers in IR35 when 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.

To answer if the poster above, if they cracked down on abuse in the public sector of incompetence and skivers, those would be on the dole, not some fancy private sector role. And don’t they know it.

PMSL! Firstly, most of the final salary pensions have been phased out & they’re not nearly as gold-plated as people think they are. Secondly, who do you think actually runs the country because, newsflash, it’s not the elected government! They might make policies but the work requires knowledgeable, experienced people who provide a continuity when govt changes. Civil Servants also heavily influence what govt policies are because they know what’s viable. How well they do that is up for debate obviously. Finally, have you seen the absolute shambles going on with CS Pensions currently?! It’s an absolute disgrace. People who have given their to public service have been left high & dry with no income when they should have had their lump sums and regular pensions but there’s a giant backlog and maladministration by Capita.

The link was posted yesterday. (institute for Government report if you want to search.)

No one these days has a DB pension based on final salary - they’re all based on career average. Employee and employer contributions are way higher than you’ve posted.

I think surviving spouse's pensions and dependant children's pensions are paid. Also a dependant's pension may be paid eg to a disabled financially dependant relative - in this case though you have to apply BEFORE you retire.

I retired almost 20 years ago. I was in education and my pension now is more than the average UK wage. But my contributions whilst I was working were around 12% of my salary. I worked for more than 30 years and retired on a final salary pension. I think it would be fairer to extend those benefits rather than decide they should be illegal. Having a decent income in retirement should be a right. It contributes hugely to the health and welfare of older people and saves money in the long run. If people can’t afford to live in their retirement the taxpayer will pick up the slack anyway. There are scores of people claiming pension credit because the basic state pension is inadequate.

I worked for a local authority social services for 15 years, got no raise for the last 7 years and hourly rate was low! The final salary pension I was promised was ended before I finished.
Public sector working is thankless! No perks, like equivalent private sector jobs.
You are being unreasonable.

It would take probably 80 years to get to the end of all DB benefits that employees have if the schemes were terminated tomorrow. How would you fund the ring fenced pensions for that group which already exist, alongside whatever new scheme you also need to pay for, when both need to be done today? The advantage of the current schemes being unfunded is that it’s only the difference between contributions and total pensions that the government needs to fund in each year. I would expect the cost in today’s terms of all those existing pensions would be in the trillions of pounds and the government can’t pluck that money out of the air to fund the existing obligations while putting away the current contributions for their future pensions. I think that makes the UK look terrible to the financial markets which has knock on effects many times the magnitude of the Truss budget.

You could design a DC scheme with whatever contribution rate you wanted, it wouldn’t need to be equivalent to the DB benefit they already have, but it probably wouldn’t be popular.

I actually think one of the key problems with modern politics is the short term nature of governments never thinking beyond the end of the parliament, which is why longer term issues are never debated or resolved. Look at social care, HS2 and other big infrastructure projects - either nothing gets started or it does and is delayed and amended and delayed and changed until it costs multiples of the original estimate and is completed 15 years late.

I work in financial services and earn good money with a 17.5% contribution DC scheme. My brother works for the NHS, much harder than me and with huge debts. I have never once felt that he didn’t deserve it. Very few people in the public sector are rich

Lots of schools are pulling out of the TPS. Teachers are enrolled in less generous pension schemes now.
Teaching is a shitty stressful job. One of the only benefits was being in TPS.
Shitty stressful jobs ( also police, fire NHS etc) deserve decent pensions. Anyone who thinks otherwise is VVU.

They'd have a huge employment law problem and expensive lawsuit if they just withdraw those benefits which are contractual

I dont think you know that much.

I think the main problem is the huge allocation of a persons salary is across the board, I totally agree, teachers, nhs, police, fire should get what they do but someone doing admin in a council department should not get a quarter of their salary into their DB pension scheme, I know someone who gets this so it is happening, they should get the same or slightly more than a private sector employee.

God OP you’re really up for an argument today. I’m taking Rebekah Vardys sage advice on this one.

You know civil servants are tax payers too?

My contributions are 12%, and my salary considerably lower than private sector equivalent. Final salary schemes ended years ago, and replaced by career average, which penalises women who will often have reduced earnings due to childcare responsibilities. I will be well into my 80s before I will receive back what I have paid in to my pension. It’s only a few very high earners who end up with gold plated salaries (NHS).

Ha ha 🤣 You should be a comedian OP!! YABU!! Whenever anyone whinges about DB pensions, my standard answer is…why don’t you just join an organisation that offers one? If you can’t beat them, join them? I’ve got 21 years worth of a DB pension and am due to get a lovely pension 🙌

@ concertinacornflake & @OneAmberFinch

I think there’s a bit of crossed wires here about what “one Parliament can’t bind another” actually means.

It’s a legal principle, not a “governments can’t make long‑term decisions” principle. All it means is: Any future Parliament can change or repeal any law a previous Parliament passed.

That’s it. It doesn’t mean governments can’t make choices that have long‑lasting consequences. They absolutely can - and do - all the time. Brexit is the perfect example: legally we could rejoin tomorrow if Parliament voted for it, but politically and diplomatically it would be a nightmare. That’s the difference between legal sovereignty and real‑world consequences.

So when posters say “you’re confusing law with policy”, that’s what they’re getting at. A government can make a policy decision that’s very hard to unwind later, but that doesn’t mean Parliament is legally bound forever.

Which is why your thread title (“DB pensions should be illegal”) doesn’t quite make sense if taken literally. Parliament can make DB pensions illegal on Tuesday and a future Parliament can make them legal again on Wednesday.

There’s no such thing as “illegal forever” in a sovereign Parliament - just political choices that may be difficult to reverse.

Try claiming your golden plated public pension - i think you will find thousands of people who are being royally fucked over right now. Just google it

Exactly, it’s shifted to average of x highest years, to average over all years and then that average has been further reduced by having each year count as less than 1. The minimum threshold to get any DB pension has gone up from say 20yrs of service to 30, 40 with minimum ages added in that generally were state pension age minus a # (also gradually reduced) so the school leavers that started an internship at 14 in ye good old days could not longer ‘retire’ with a pension at 34! Or that person who is 50 with 30yrs service,,,sorry you can’t retire either.

What counts as the salary for pension calculations has also been reduced from gross pay to base pay (a mechanism where any sort of higher salary for being in a high cost living area ie Whitehall or posted abroad with higher wages and things like housing allowances don’t get included in determining the salary). This put a stop to career civil servants scrambling to finish their career at HQ London or some plushy, very expensive and highly paid overseas post in Singapore or the UN in NYC.

ie old DB pension based on final salary in some cases was as high as 80% of highest salary paid for life after only 25yrs service at any age!

Today, many are more like (as an hypothetical example) minimum age 57 and minimum 20 years service. Pension is 1% times years of service times average career base pay which is then reduced by 0.25% per year you retire below state pension age of 67.

DB civil service pensions today are a tiny fraction compared to what they were for the boomers. Just another ladder being pulled up behind them like the paid to get a Uni degree ladder was pulled up and replaced with the highest student loan debt burden per student in the OECD.

They haven’t been final salary for decades though…….most of those who had that pension have already finished

One of my concerns, which is why I referenced the "binding of future parliaments" thing, is that a future government which decided it wanted to reduce the amount of spending on pensions wouldn't be able to do it, because the payments today are deferred payments for past work.

But later Parliaments have indeed reduced pensions passed by earlier Parliaments to save costs. How do think the final salary pension gradually got chipped away at? Look at any government department and you will see older workers tend to be on better older DB pension plans, with younger workers on less generous, newer pension plans. They can and do reduce pension costs, they just can’t flip it like a light switch because it quite literally affects the lives of millions of people.

Editing to add, pension payments are not deferred payments for past work other than colloquially. In an accounting and taxation sense, they are not at all.

Growing up in school I was always taught that it was a fundamental principle of a parliamentary democracy that one parliament cannot bind another. Parliament should be able to override anything a previous parliament did, so that voters always have the ability to change course democratically and nothing is locked in forever.

That is sort of true but you’ve completely misunderstood it. The commons is sovereign and the sovereign can overturn a prior decision. However, decisions always include future obligations, so later Parliaments can have their hands tied insofar as to how much and how fast they can overturn or reverse an earlier law.

For example, when Parliament B overturns the state pension age of Parliament A by raising it to 70, they are required by law to consider the impact to the people and implementing a mechanism so that there is fairness. This is why their dates set for the pension age going up, are set in the future and there are legal guidelines as to what is considered fair and just. The Ministry of Justice can strike down any law Parliament passes that does not meet basic constitutional rights (difficult in England as the constitution is largely based on common law and case precedent rather than a formal signed & sealed document like other countries)

DB pensions are not insane. The insanity is that these were and are unfunded commitments that can be inherited in full by a spouse. Other countries that have public and/or private DB pensions usually require that they be funded and that inheritance- or survivor benefit is capped at 50% or less for long term partnerships only. Generally the attrition of people in such a large pool (attrition meaning dying before they collect a pension) and the contributions of more workers to pensioners means these funds are perfectly viable and often in surplus. DB funds are also superior to DC funds in that professionals manage them and so there is less risk of loss of investment plus workers are better able to plan for retirement and not end up reliant on welfare benefits including a state pension in their old age.

The country can’t afford higher salaries or higher DC pensions for their civil servants. It’s too late to switch from an unfunded model to a funded one. BTW, DC pensions can also be unfunded- see various pension scandals where companies closed and workers/retirees lost their pension savings.

The insanity is having unfunded promises.

Quite different from the government of 5 years' time being forced to pay another 20y of pension for someone who retired 5 years before they even came into power and had no control of the hiring of.

Your criticism of the above is also insane. You can’t allow a government to play with people’s lives like that it completely destroys the social contract and regresses us to Henry VIII state of affairs in regards to human rights.