To think this is appalling? (Civil Service salary)

[MrsSchadenfreude]

Having a clear out the other day, I found some old payslips from 2001 when I was an HEO in the civil service. I was earning just over £27,000. I thought I would have a look and see what an HEO earns today. Outside London, the starting salary is £27,150, with those in London getting £30,388. So virtually no rise in 20 years!

Yes the figures are all based on taking 100% tax free lump sum. I’m not 100% sure I’ll do that, I guess I’ll take advice nearer the time and see what is right. I’m going on a pension course next week, I had 10yrs part time due to ill health (still not 100% but back full time a few years now, but no guarantee I can keep that up another 20yrs) so may see what they say

Pension is still ok.... If you get it. Recently I know several people who were felled very shortly into their retirement and all those years of doing it for the pension turned out to be a bit pointless :(

I think if I had my time again I'd take my chances with an employer or private pension and a more lucrative career. I barely earn any more now in the CS than I did when I joined in 2004, in real terms... Certainly not if you use CPI rather than GDP-based inflation figures. Grim. And I also pay 8% of my salary into pension. For anyone also paying student loan contributions and childcare costs .... Ouch.

that is shocking. HEOs in Ireland start on 51,k

I started on £16k in 2007 and the equivalent new trainees are being taken on at £19k in 2022. Also public sector. Pay has really stagnated.

Pensions are a real real worry in these years of continued wage freezes. If your wages are not going up now then neither are your pension contributions. So not only do we have less to live off while we are in work and it doesn't go as far because of inflation but also by the time we retire our pots won't be as big either because we haven't had the wage increases expected to take the pension contributions from.

It honestly makes me feel sick for the future when I think about it too much.

Yes, if that salary had kept up with inflation it would be worth about 24.5k now.

"who were felled"? Is this a quaint way of saying they died?

DH had four years of pay freezes in his previous department. He's been in his current one nearly three years (and despite it being published that Civil Servants are meant to be getting a pay rise), they've come up with some reason why they're department won't qualify.

He was told a few years ago that his pension had under performed and took out another small pension which has done appallingly and he said he may as well have saved it instead! I think I'll be getting DH to check his lump sum, it's around 2x is final salary (I've seen the paperwork so am sure).

I have two jobs, one public, one private sector. It's only the private sector one that's given me a pay rise and unfortunately I work there one day a week, so wage wise we're better off by £16.50 a month.

@CurlyhairedAssassin didn't mean it to be quaint. They were felled - quick, brutal, uncompromising deaths.

apologies, I didn't mean for my question to sound sarcastic. I just didn't know if it was a typo.

The department I work in is AA minimum wage, AO 20k, EO 24k. Don’t know for above EO.

Don’t believe the lies about rich civil servants or gold plated pensions.

Public sector 30+ years - lump sum frozen for years, no longer accruing. Princely sum of £19k!!! and about £12k a year!

HEOs in my department start on approx £28k, getting a 3% rise this month. I came in on quite a bit more as they matched my pay.

Yup. I started 13 years ago on £22,221. The same scale point now is £27, 741. If it had kept pace with inflation it would be £31k

Grade 7 is £54k in my department. It’s risen by less than 10% in ten years.

I nearly applied for a SS SEO role in my area a year or so ago until I realised what they were expecting of the role for about 35k. Managing a busy service and about 20
staff.

LGPS (Local Government Pension Scheme) is Defined Benefit, i.e. the amount you get as pension depends on career average earnings and the number of years in the scheme. That's how it still is even if you start working for Local Government today. There's also a mechanism whereby if you rejoin the LGPS you can ask them to consolidate any previous LGPS pensions into your new fund.

If you work part time, an adjustment is made e.g. if you work for 2 years at 50% of full time, that counts as 1 year of contributions at the full time rate

I am employed by a local authority- I have been a frontline social worker for nearly 20 years. Before that I was a nurse. Wages have stagnated for 12 years but an even bigger impact has been the increasingly impossible working conditions due to chronic underfunding and in my role (and for most other public sector workers) the huge rise in poverty and other services also being totally underfunded. People are just leaving and even working in an outstanding LA we cannot recruit. I get really fed up with the argument about our pensions and benefits (which have been massively eroded over the years). It used be accepted that this was the case because usually you will earn less working in the public sector than for your equivalent experience, skills and training would earn in the private sector.

There are plenty of unfilled jobs in nursing, teaching, social work etc and also many other roles in the public sector such as lawyers, HR, information governance, IT, admin etc. so lots of possibilities for those who envy the pension scheme.

LGPS used to be final salary didn't it?

Totally recognise this. And really think that the benchmarking with MP /ministerial pay and their officials should be reintroduced

Not a civil servant but salaries have stagnated in my industry which requires most people to be qualified and/ or chartered.

Luckily I've managed to get promoted so personally have seen my pay increase by about 50% but if I'd stayed at the same grade I'd have had a 0 or 5% increase

Yep, changed a number of things in 2014. Used to be 1/60 of final pay x years of service, now 1/49 of career average x years of service (actually more complex than this, but serves as a rough guide). And before 2008 it was 1/80 x final pay plus a lump sum of 3 x pension.

There's still quite a few company defined benefits out there, at least for people who have been in a company for a while. Ones that come to mind from my days as a paraplanner include many financial institutions (e.g. Banks/investment banks) and "blue chip" companies like British Airways, BAE systems, John Lewis Partnership. Most of the original DB providers have now moved to defined contributions (DC), but there are some specialist IFAs who are still doing good business transferring older DB pensions

I guess that the old final salary pension schemes meant that people were keen to take on promotions towards the end of their career. Now they must weigh it up and wonder if they’d be any better off, when they think of the stress and added responsibility they’d be taking on. my own DH doesn’t want to go any further in the civil service. I don’t blame him, he works enough hours as it is now, another promotion would probably send him to an early grave

Apologies for not reading full thread but wanted to post as have just started a CS post this week as EO. OP is correct. In fact it's worse, salary is £23k! Less than I earned as a graduate 25 years ago. Have a tonne of experience but returning to work after a break to raise a family and found it hard to get my experience to count in CS so accepted offer. Hoping to work my way up. Now that I've started I get the impression my manager is shocked by my accepting such a low grade post.

To make matters worse, I'm based in London, but WFH.