To think public sector DB pensions should be illegal

Mine is a big pension if I make it to 67 -40yrs service. 250k lump sum, 35k a year ish. I do pay £400 plus probably more towards it.

I think you’re mixing up two different concepts here. DB pensions don’t “bind future parliaments” in the constitutional sense. Parliament can and does change public sector pension rules all the time - accrual rates, retirement ages, indexation, contribution levels, scheme structures. Nothing is legally locked in forever.

The reason DB pensions exist isn’t because governments are trying to commit future governments to anything, it’s because they’re part of the total compensation package for roles that historically had lower pay, high stress, and long‑term retention needs. Teaching, nursing, policing, firefighting, civil service… these aren’t jobs where people stay for the salary alone.

If you scrapped DB pensions tomorrow, you’d have to raise public sector salaries by 20–40% overnight to remain competitive. That would cost far more upfront than the current pension system does spread over decades. And you’d still have a recruitment crisis because people wouldn’t stay long enough to build experience.

Also worth remembering: private sector DB schemes didn’t disappear because they were “insane”, they disappeared because private companies can go bust, can’t pool risk across millions of workers, and don’t have the ability to borrow cheaply or tax. The government can, which is why DB is still viable in the public sector.

You’re not unreasonable to question sustainability, lots of economists do, but the idea that DB pensions are unconstitutional or somehow illegal in principle doesn’t really hold. They’re just one way of structuring pay, and if you remove them, you’d have to replace them with something much more expensive in the short term.

In other words: it’s not that DB pensions bind future parliaments. It’s that they’re the only way to make public sector pay workable without blowing the annual budget.

i think they mean how big a pension pot would you need to get a 12k annual pension. I imagine it would be around 200-300k?

Growing up in school I was always taught that it was a fundamental principle of a parliamentary democracy that one parliament cannot bind another.
You've misunderstood what this means, it seems you're confusing law with policy? Of course every government makes policy decisions that the subsequent governments are stuck with - look at Brexit!

I have retired but I know what you mean. In fact though I was going by the value of my package quoted to me when I accepted the jobs.

It's not a huge pension. And it's paid for by a percentage of salary.

I imagine someone else may have replied already but in the LGPS at least, taking the pension before state retirement age would be heavily penalised and most pensions are not final salary but are career average.

Similar for DH. He was an HEO in the civil service and retired after 35 years with a pension of around £15,000. He can hardly have a good life on that.

Or the fact one of the reasons the civil service needed to increase post 2020 was due to Brexit which decentralised many functions. Which the DM endorsed.

No parliament can bind its successors … due to the parliamentary legislative process which already gets used to change pensions legislation

OP- LGPS is funded, with a net surplus...

It seems there would be no way to ever reduce the size of the public sector.

The ever growing public sector, courtesy of Daily Mail headlines of the “most Civil Servants since x” etc (in the region of 550,000 these days having risen to fill the gaps of government shared across the EU)

They never mention the cuts from > 720,000 making the Civil Service 2/3rds of its previous scale

NHS too

Exactly. Maybe I'm daft but I don't even understand what the issue is in the OP. You get paid less in public sector then get better pension vs getting a better salary and less pension? The money is still coming from the same pot but they would need to pay sooner to keep people from joining private sector.

What school taught you that? Embarrassing OP

The reality is that only government can future proof / future promise pensions…private capital cannot (based in any reality). You are unaware of huge pension failures / market failures ?

How utterly pathetic to want public servants to receive less too…how about not chasing less but advocating for better ALL

Pick me economics, Simping for billionaires 🤢 extracting wealth that just passes you by??

I could earn double, plus bonuses in the private sector.

Your argument doesn’t really stack up though, because if I got paid more now, this would also be binding future authorities as my contractual terms would need to be met.

The alternative is that they outsource my team, this would be easily 4 x the operational and staffing costs of my department. Minimum.

You’re missing one major point about the current pension process.
Currently it is not paid until it is due to be claimed, and an “equivalent” may be calculated to compare the “whole pay & pension package as if it were paid

If it was changed to the equivalent contribution being paid in salary for personal arrangements to be made then it would be real money.
The people who are going to die before claiming turn into an extra cost in real terms rather on the promise of getting it if they live

They would need to increase wages though as people wouldn't work for the lower salaries if it wasn't for the pension which makes up for it.

We may end up there, they've being stripped away for many years, especially at the bottom with encouragement to transfer to the DC option. Not great encouragement, but it's been there.

They should have no deferred comp. Either paid today as cash/in-year salary and bonuses, or paid today as cash into a retirement account in the person's name that they can manage themselves and has nothing to do with the government going forward.

If we remove any deferred compensation, would that mean civil servant contracts paying overtime as default rather than the deferred compensation of time in lieu/flexi as it is in many departments?

Cause my pay would be way higher if I was actually compensated for my overtime when I did it rather than getting emails each pay cycle to gently remind me that I'm near the flexi limit again and can use my flexi to leave 30 minutes early...if everything has been finished first...because they'd rather I didn't replace one of my annual leave days with flexi leave again. My annual leave calendar starts in June, and I've already done it twice.

Personally, I think giving those who regularly work overtime time off to compensate has more benefits for everyone than the cash alternative, and while that may be the norm in other sectors, it's absolutely not in mine. That's why I put up with public service BS, it's nothing to do with pensions that, with my disabilities, I think is fairly unlikely for me to see, it's 'think of the flexi' through another late evening.

But they can't, because they're still stuck paying for teachers who retired 20 years ago.

As pp have said, pensions can be and have been changed before.

Governments have and are doing far worse than not paying people a promised pension. The idea that they absolutely can't do whatever because of an employment contract is laughable. It would be a risky move, we could say it's something they shouldn't do, but it's absolutely not something they can't do.

If the voters of tomorrow decide that control of that waterway is critical to the nation's security and vote for that party, sure,

Regardless of the ideals you were taught in school, do you really think this is how governments work? Do you think our government right now is doing what the voters decided is critical at the last election?