To worry about how the heck my public sector pension is going to pay out when I'm old given that the UK almost certainly won't exist by then

That does make sense though. But not currently how it works for my mother.

She isn’t a UK citizen, lives outside the UK and earned the right to the UK pension she has from working in the UK. If N Ireland splits from the UK, the responsibility for paying the pension of the Northern Ireland pensioners goes with it. Your mother would still have the right to a UK pension, but someone who earned their contribution while living in N Ireland wouldn’t.

And there is no contract that says anyone will receive a penny. State pensions are a benefit and could disappear at the flick of a switch if the country governing them wanted to. They’re not obliged to pay a penny. If you’ve paid contributions you are entitled to a proportion of a pension, but a proportion of £0 is £0.

Life expectancy in 1908 was 45 for men and 49 for women. Pensions weren’t needed because people didn’t live long enough to need one.

This doesn't mean what you seem to think it does. Average life expectancy in 1900 was skewed by the number of children, particulary poor children, who died in infancy. It does not mean that most people died in their 40s.

You only have to walk around a Victorian graveyard to see plenty of people actually lived to be old, quite a lot are over 80. If you survived childhood or something like cholera then you were reasonably likely to live to be old enough to need assistance when you could no longer work.

Exactly, it’s the biggest obstacle because the instability would be painful for a generation. If we had a decent leadership they should already have an Indy fund set up and ring fenced earning interest. This may help buffer some of the hardship that would inevitably come.

Instead the SNP have literally stolen people’s hard earned donations and nobody is being held accountable. It’s a tragedy of epic proportions and highlights that Scotland has much work to do still to win the argument for independence.

Whisky, bagpipes, Bonnie scenery and all the sentimental romantic stuff that makes Scotland a phenomenal country ain’t gonna cut it. It needs a serious game plan with economics at the centre.

So you'd quite like an independent Scotland but also for your pension to still be paid/topped up by England for the duration of your retirement? Why can't the great and mighty Scotland pay you from whatever the settlement/breakaway amount is? (For want of a better phrase)

If Scotland becomes independent it'll have to start paying it's own bills in full for a change.

The thing is I think a well run Scotland could have been creating an excess each year rather than a deficit. If they hadn’t undersold the green energy licences, if they stuck to the same benefits regime as England, if they didn’t have free tuition (which is absolutely KILLING Scottish unis, a major export of ours). The Scottish government have no understanding of how to run a country successfully. It’s just all about covering up dodgy dealings (Alex Salmond case) bribing voters with wild benefits, and trans. Always trans. What is it with the trans??? Will we ever find out?

But then again us in Scotland get the regular entertainment of guessing which SNP MSP is the thickest. This weeks candidate, Collette Stephenson who despite being on the transport committee for 2 years asked in a meeting whether Transport Scotland was a registered charity. It’s the government department you’ve been overseeing for 2 years you total imbecile!!!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmp302wew991o

You pity the civil servants having to deal with people THIS DENSE.

Your goldplated public section pension will manage just fine.

Ironically the SNP post Salmond have been a disaster for Scotland. Salmond was definitely a bit slimey but he was deliberately smeared and nobody held accountable even though people were proved to have blatantly lied. Salmond was smart and savvy and had the ability to compromise and negotiate.

Sturgeon turned the SNP into a wokist nightmare obsessed with trans ideology. Nobody really cares about it but they care about the economy and well run services including our once world renowned universities.

I'm guessing that if there is a united Ireland then there will be many detailed negotiations and amongst then will be reciprocal arrangements for pensions.

? There’s no way a newly independent nation will get any money off rUK when pensions are immediately paid out of tax collected. No way. What will happen on Indy is that the big book in which it is written who has paid how many years of NICs will be passed over, and zero cash whatsoever. There’s no principle that would suggest you do anything else.

And Scottish NHS pensions are separate from English NHS pensions, so NHS pensions would be paid from the Scottish government on Indy too. And you’ll be getting it in whatever currency they come up with. Which may or may not devalue rapidly when the short sellers have some fun with it.

Exactly. The birthrate was far higher back then, and so was infant mortality. If every woman has ten kids, eight die in childbirth and two live to 100, the average life expectancy of those kids is 20. Therefore definitely no need for old age pensions then. But if every woman has two kids and they live to 100, there is an obvious need for an old age pension, even though the number of people getting old is exactly the same.

OP I can understand your worries. Even before all this talk of breaking up the UK I did think that anyone relying on the UK state for anything might just not get it (or at least not fully).
I mean there is alot going on in the UK just now with low growth, big debt, high bond interest, huge welfare burden. So what happens if we do end up with an IMF bailout at some point. They will slash everything and quite right as we are living way beyond our means. First thing we have to do is stop borrowing. Then we have to start repaying it. So we either have to grow our economy greatly and thus taxes or slash everything to the bone.
Are they really going to let these huge public sector pensions stay intact when the country is bankrupt? I don't know.

I had a final salary scheme pension in a company that went bust and it got transferred to the pension protection fund. As I hadn't retired yet I am supposed to get 90% of it. However the numbers it is projecting to give me are quite frankly pathetic.

So I think your worry is justified. Not just if the UK were to split up but because of the dire state of it being a failing economy. Same goes for anyone relying on the state for money be that state pensions, welfare of any kind, or their job in the public sector. Definately not a sure thing anymore. On the plus side those of us with defined contribution schemes are at the mercy of the stock/bond markets and so not really any better off.

Utter incompetence but that’s been the SNP for years now.

Bosnia isn’t in the EU. It’s just working towards it.

No, but realistically any separation would be by agreement which would include how pension commitments would be dealt with.

If the UK and its successor governments blatantly reneged on such commitments their fiscal credibility would be shattered. Its currency would crash (who would buy government bonds knowing it had a propensity to casually disregard contracts), the economy would disintegrate, and it would become a failed state and descend into chaos.

You’re catastrophising about something that just won’t happen.

The UK wouldn’t be renaging on anything. The UK that made any pension agreement would no longer exist. There would be any remaining UK nations and the independent nation, and it would be the independent nation that would be responsible for providing its citizens with a pension. The entity that is made up of the countries that remain in the UK would have no responsibility whatsoever to pay state or public sector pensions to citizens of another country. Those citizens would have their pension provided by their government.

This isn’t tricky stuff. It isn’t something to be ‘negotiated’. Any politician that tells you otherwise is talking out of their backside. It’s worse nonsense than Boris’s Brexit bus.

You’re correct. Local Government is funded. (Ie there’s an actual fund with real assets) but health, teachers, civil service etc pensions are just an expenditure line on the Government’s annual budget, like state pensions.

No, I think you are completely mistaken as to how this would work….

Yes, the Public Sector Pensions Act 2013 is UK Law, but unless there was a civil war and the countries of the UK split apart in a violent and disordered way, any dissolution of the Union would by agreement.

This agreement would involve an arrangement for converting current UK law in the new the law of the new states, in much the same way as huge amounts of EU regulations were simply converted directly into UK law upon Brexit.

The new states would then retain, repeal and amend these laws as they saw fit… which realistically wouldn’t involve them erasing all the accumulated earned pension rights of their public sector workers!

Unlike “funded” local government pensions, your pension contribution wasn’t put into a ring-fenced “fund” from which your pension was then paid. It was just received by HM Treasury when you paid it… and now they pay you what they owe based on the terms of the Civil Service Pension Scheme. That’s what “unfunded” means in the context of pensions.

I don't know how Wales are going to honour public sector pensions if we go independent. 🙈

Why do you assume the sum of the individual nations will be poorer than the UK?

Basically she’s admitting that England bankrolls Scotland… Maybe it’s time to cut Scotland loose, let it become our penniless neighbour whilst we become wealthier, not having to pay out subsidies!… Or maybe not, and admit that we are better together as a UK.

Best thing to do if you’re really worried and have quite a few years before pension age -is save independently whatever you are able to.Or look at getting a S.I.P.P
That is what myself and DH and we both had to retire early- we’ve had to use the savings to pay the bills until pension kicks in.

The special pot of money only really applies to personal pensions. Anyone in a defined benefits or career average group type scheme is contributing into a big pot that they have their pension paid from when necessary. The difference with civil service pensions is their salaries are actuarial reduced prior to paying to account for the contribution. This is good for the government as it appears civil servants don't pay contributions and the government gets to keep part of the payroll. There is no big pot for civil servants as the government simply keeps that bit of payroll and pays out of general taxation. For many public sector employees they do actually have pension funds that they and the authorities contribute into.