AIBU to not understand how things are allowed to get this bad?

[ButIamrightright]

“The vast Carillion construction and public services group was fighting for survival this weekend as management, the government and lenders to the stricken construction services firm were locked in rescue talks. The company is bleeding cash from several contracts that have turned sour and it is struggling under the weight of £1.5bn of debt, including a huge £590m pension deficit”.

How are the pension deficits allowed to get so big?

vegecook

Where are our media? Why isn't this being publicised when they're talking about our NHS being ravaged by immigrants. Who signed these deals? They're treating us like idiots, we're fools to be missing this.

We don't really have a media anymore, imv. It's one of the unforeseen outcomes out the digital revolution. There's just not the money to pay reporters to do investigative pieces. Add to that the general nervousness of anything to do with finance (modern reporters tend to be arts and humanities grads) plus the pro Labour slant of a lot of the establishment (BBC etc), the civil service's tendency to bury disastrous former policy decisions and the lack of media fluency on the part of the LibDems and Tories... and you end up with a scandal of epic proportions that never quite crashes into public consciousness.

One aspect of it did though. Back in 2010, when the Tories first got back in (in coalition), one of the batshit outcomes of a PFI deal reached the newspapers: that the PFI deal done over Downing Street meant the annual Xmas tree for No.10 cost something like £700. Apparently, Osborne was furious about it.

PFI was originally designed as a vehicle to fund commercial projects in the national interest.

The best example is probably the Channel Tunnel where government thus avoided liability if the project overrun or failed and PFI investors received the income of commercial tickets sales. This worked because the taxpayer wasn't on the hook for providing the revenue to pay back the deal.

But when New Labour expanded the concept to fund school and hospital build and renovation, the taxpayer was the one expected to provide the revenue.

And it's crippled the NHS.

Well, regarding the pensions aspect - this is one of the critical reasons, and a problem that future generations will be paying for.

You can't have an average worker starting work even very young, say 16 or 18, working for 40 years at most (some possibly part time, part NI contributions/etc) then retiring with decades on the average lifespan. It doesn't matter if it's defined benefit or contribution based, the fact is that too few people have paid in for too little time, and are taking too much out. They've (we've) pulled the ladder up behind them, well and truly.

There are certain generations who will look back on the massive pensions crisis that is looming and wonder how on earth people (average, middling people - working class, the lot) thought this could last. It can't, and wasn't ever designed to work for this long with these calculations.

It's a miracle more pension funds haven't collapsed TBH.

In fact, the locking down of good pensions deals needed to start more firmly, and a lot sooner, IM (professional) opinion.

We have a lot to be sorry for to today's teens/20s and 30s-age people.

Forgot to add, you can see that attitudes towards pensions are wrong just by browsing the MN money forums, if anyone's terribly curious - an example being teachers on some of the best pensions terms money could buy and yet bemoaning having to pay such a "high" chunk into them (except you can't, no pension provider would be mad enough to take so little premiums for so much risk and such big rewards).

We are all part of the pensions problem - my generation included! The numbers don't add up, and they never were going to, but we all want to take whats "ours" out as promised.

Like a ponzi scheme, someone's hopes are going to be dashed, and for now, that's our youth.

Too big to fail?

So far in the thread it's been Thatcher, Blair AND Brown's fault. Heh.

There aren't plans so much as plenty for sharks in the pond after the cash.

This thread lost me at the suggestion that the beeb is pro-labour.

pick

The BBC was very pro-New Labour / Blairism.

It was quite well reported about the campaign corks littering BBC Centre on election night in 1997.

That was 2 decades ago. They haven't had a lefty bias for the past decade.

With all this money disappearing into the pockets of the wealthy, I wonder if the UK is being asset stripped. Tell me I’m paranoid, please, people who understand these things.

Something What money has disappeared into which wealthy pockets. Over the last 12ish months, shareholders of Carillion have lost £2bn and the banks shareholders have lost £900m

Also they seem to have done work in the Middle East of many £millions for which they have not been paid - unwise judgement?

The tentacles of this giant construction and outsourcing company, valued at £2bn only the summer before last, reached into the nooks and crannies of every part of the UK’s public services. It was a kind of parasitic growth in Whitehall growing fat on the contracts that government fed to it. It must not now be allowed to nationalise its losses.

The Guardian view on Carillion: reaping the consequences of corporate greed

Doubtful that went all went into the pockets of the poor or back to the taxpayer, so where do we suppose it went?

So far in the thread it's been Thatcher, Blair AND Brown's fault. Heh. Yep! Each compounded the problem by pushing at an ever open door... don't forget Osbourne!

Once deregulation started it became ever easier to snip away a little bit more of the safeguards. You do have to wonder what the bloody logic was. As far as I can see, and events bear out, it was pretty much Hey, yes, you can take it out, use it for whatever and replace it when you get a moment... oops!

As others have said, see BHS for another recent example!

DH is just waiting for his company to work out if they hold any Carillion debt. It'll take a while to work it out, as each sub contractor works out which bill won't be paid! Many of his long term work colleagues have already been told... their small companies are probably stuffed, wait and see if the industry as a whole can absorb this.

If it doesn't there is on hell of a lot of infrastructure work that will grind to a halt - think motorway and railway work for a start!