I work for a private organisation that deals almost entirely with the public sector and due to my role see almost all TUPE information of staff who transfer to us from the public sector, i can assure you i am speaking from a position (of a certain amount) of knowledge, having seen first hand what kind of ridiculous contracts have been handed out to public sector workers. You can get all upset as much as you like but it won't change the fact that huge mismanagment and a lack of forthought resulted in stupid terms being handed out to public sector workers. I appreciate that things have changed in recent times and also that it's quite a personal subject and obviously things differ from organisation to organisation, but to try and brush aside the very obvious failing of the public sector and pretend public sector workers havent been incredibly lucky with some of there terms of employment is just plain stupidity and narrow-mindedness. 6 months - a year full sick pay anyone?
Take the plank out of your own eye. Having worked in both sectors at a relatively high level then I do have a good perspective of the benefits in each sectors and a good basis upon which to evaluate the relative performance in both. Those who demand that the private sector is both more efficient and effective are merely deluding themselves.
If you contribute to your pension then for some reason loose your pension benefit (such as a Police officer being convicted of a criminal offence) then you loose your pension, but are refunded the amount you have paid in, but not the element your employers have paid in.
There's not long to go now before the new inquests into the Hillsborough disaster open, if Bettison is found to have committed a criminal offence and is subsequently charged and convicted can or will the pension he's getting from the Merseyside taxpayers be taken off him?
I've worked for the railways for decades, when it was both public and then private sector. I've paid @ 10-15% of my gross pay into a pension fund all my career, and also an AVC too. Even though it's one of the few final salary schemes left (thank God for strong unions) we've still had to pay pension shortfalls for the last 10 years due to various privateer franchisees taking pension holidays. What ****ing infuriates me about this private/public, Sun/mail-inspired infighting is the stoking of the politics of envy by the right - the same people who scream blue murder when you uncover the unbelievably generous personal tax avoidance scams and pension plans that, in effect, the rest of tax-paying public is propping up. My sister though had worked for 37 years for the council in education/child welfare in a very demanding and specialised job. They had a re-organisation and practically everyone (apart from HR and Finance who were running the process) had their jobs re-evaluated by @25% wage decrease. that's right, three years before she gets 40 years in she had the Hobson's choice of taking redundancy with a 37 year pension rather than 40 years, or see out her 40 years and and have her final salary reduced by 25% (they haven't had a pay rise for four years anyway). Evidently the government expected the council to hire unpaid volunteers - with no qualifications or security checks for working with children. Know what? They had to hire her as a 'consultant' (for two years now) at @ 50% an hour more than she was being paid anyway, as there is no-one qualified to do her work. But some accountant is happy to have her pension liability off the books. A few years back they did the same to one of the senior managers in our control centre as he was coming up to his forty years - some fat cow from HR with a CIPD stuck up her arse, who didn't know one end of a train from another, did a re-org and said he didn't have the 'values and behaviours' they were looking for. They gave him his (quite generous) severance - then immediately re-hired him for four years as there was no-one else qualified to do his job. Not any of the hatchet-faced incompetents from LinkedIn that the HR manager had lined up to do it anyway. Anyway, point is, afc, that you, I'm afraid, typify the race-to-the-bottom thinking they want us all to have. They won't be happy until we all have no pensions, no employment rights and zero hours contracts. And that's the trouble with liberal economics - Communism for the masses, 'freedom' for the elite. Stalin would be proud of you. FFS, if you think some people have better pensions than you then fight for a better one. The ****s won't give you it for licking their arses. You're right Garlic, or at least that's what happens with us. Some dickhead I worked with some years ago was sacked for drinking on duty, and that's what they did to him. He also lost all benefits of a final salary scheme too, and I THINK he lost the employer contribution part to his AVC, though I think since tax changes the employers don't contribute towards AVC's any more anyway. Btw Tobes, did we not have this conversation before on the old 606 and you said you'd always (by choice) been a contractor as the wages were higher, although the benefits were fewer?Fair enough, that's your choice - as with my other sister who's an accountant. She's used her extra wages over the years to accrue the biggest pension pot of us all and isn't the least bit bitter about public sector pensions. Where do you stand? Have you made provisions? My ex's feller runs his own taxi firm and has been coining it in (with the help of some leary accountants) for years. As he's approaching his 50's he now rambles on about public sector 'gold-plated' pensions - as he's never put a ****ing penny of his tax-avoided funds in a scheme for thirty years. I don't begrudge him his money; after all, he has no sick pay or paid holidays, but I wish he'd stop saying public sector pensions (and I'm NOT public sector any more, nor have been for half my working career!) are 'free'. NO THEY'RE ****NG NOT!
Those, normally from the private sector, who kick-off about older public sector pensions and benefits are either too young or too unwilling to go back and look at the circumstances when these rates were negotiated. If you look back you will find the generally benefits and pensions were chosen by both governments and local authorities as the vehicles to reward employees as the immediate effects on their budgets were insignificant. Hence public sector wages were significantly lower than the equivalent private sector wages but the benefits were better. Now because the private sector gravy train has slowed/stopped that barter is conveniently forgotten.
The majority of final pension schemes got into trouble for two main reasons 1. Employers taking pension holidays, and not paying their share into the scheme when the stock market was high and thus investment returns covered what they should have paid in. If they had stuck to their part of the deal and continued to pay in when the market was high then the schemes would have built up a surplus to carry them through the bad times. But clever/devious accountants saw a way of increasing company profits by not paying into the scheme thus increasing the share dividend for investors and paying themselves more. As most directors also had shares, which increased in value, based upon the inflated profit, they could sell their shares at an inflated price and gain twice. 2. The second blow was when Blair came to power on the promise of not raising income tax, the tosser then invented new taxes including taxing pension schemes. The vast majority of these schemes provided something in retirement for the average working man, but Labour concentrated all their headlines on the small percentage of very wealthy people who had lucrative pension schemes. The tax on pension schemes never affected Tony and his champagne socialist mates as they just moved their money into another scam, but it hammered the pension schemes of the working man, which in a lot of cases was the only type of saving for the future people did. The current governments idea of compulsory pension schemes would have been brilliant before the Labour tax on pension profits and if employers were banned from taking pension holidays as pensions then were a very good way of saving for retirement, but now it's a case of a good idea after the horse has bolted.
Don't think it's quite as extreme as expecting everyone to end up with no pension and zero hours contracts. Slight over exageration maybe? Especially considering the compulsory pension scheme thats just been introduced... And the initiatives to eliminate zero hours contracts... I also don't care in the slightest if someone has a better pension than me - i have opted out of any and all pension schemes i have ever been offered and intend instead to rely on my own capabilities to have built up significant savings and investments to cover myself. My point was actually just that public sector contracts have ridiculous benefits that are only there through mismanagemnt and poor forthought. (The fact that fordeckdave has mentioned that it was short term thinking leading to higher benefits packages to counter lower wages, shows the lack of forthought).
If you're intending creating your own retirement nest egg, then you need to set up a SIPPS pension otherwise you're losing the tax advantages Standard annuities are ****e, as they don't allow you to stage the payments for the retirement years that you're most likely to be most active / still alive! SIPPS puts you in control & you can decide how you want you pension pot to be paid out. You can even leverage borrowing against a SIPPS pension pot & buy commercial property etc & have the income paid back into the pot tax free
so what i'd say is; a) opting out of all pensions would seem foolish to me. the tax benefits on them are significant way to save. HOWEVER.... the means to then access the funds is a minefield and would seem on the face of it (to this person well off retirement age) means for companies to screw you. widow's benefit opt in, reduced what you get.. do you take lump sum or how much over how long and all that. b) relying on any one pension also seems foolish. c) savings and investments are simply required on top of pension... if you can. the issue is imagine 30 years on state pension. its unthinkable. death in service sounds best to me. fake your own death and have everything in the wifes name. move to aussie.
I do all the cooking in my house, ever since my wife found out she would be £500k better off in lump sums/life insurance payments plus have a 50% widows pension if I die in service. Better to be safe than sorry!
What initiatives to overcome zero hours contracts - please be specific? Ah so you finally show your colours when you state that you have opted out of all schemes and rely upon your own investment prowess to make provision for your later years.Maybe your investment strategies will be successful in which case you will be one of the very few who actually beat the market over a 40 year average. I did not make the point about public sector pension and benefit increases as an example of short term thinking or management. Since the end of WW2 there has been an unwritten compromise between management and labour in the Public Sector that lower wages (and probably more limited promotion opportunities) would be off-set by higher pension rights. It is only when Thatcher broke that compromise by the privatisation of public services without any understanding of public service ethos that problems arose. As Garlic also identifies the same administration introduced the concept of employers pension holidays and the claw back of pension surpluses. Now, if you truly want an example of short term thinking and management you need look no further than the concept of private pension 'surpluses'.
I also mentioned Labour's pension raid just to give a fair view of the problems. I am not trying to make party political brownie points (those who have seen my posts know I consider all politicians self serving). Just the fact that if politicians had put into place laws to prevent pension holidays, and had not raided pensions to pretend to the populace they were keeping their promise "not to raise income tax" then pensions would be an attractive form of saving, and making them compulsory would have been beneficial to all salaried workers
Whilst I won't shy from making political points, on this occasion I was trying to highlight the short term thinking in the private sector that could even envisage the possibility of true pension surpluses. However, the break in the unwritten public sector understanding was truly a short term political fix. In 78/79, I was a very junior member of a team that presented a comprehensive review of public sector management to the Thatcher cabinet at the then Manpower Services Commission in Sheffield. This review clearly stated that the 'privatisation' of public sector management would be an unmitigated disaster and that a longer term refocusing and development of public sector management would be more beneficial. Interestingly, all refernces to that report of the meeting in Sheffield appear to have disappeared!
Be in a crate in some warehouse with the actual notes of that post-Hillsborough Police Federation meeting chaired by Millup and Bettison.
