Not ALL public sectors pensions please!
NHS and Civil Service pensions may be paid out of general taxation but Local government pensions are fully funded by employee and employer contributions - they are not paid out of general taxation. As someone has said, these funds are largely well performing, so much so that in the stock market boom years the employers stopped paying contributions in altogether and used the savings to keep council tax down for several years when it was introduced. The average local government pension is around £3,500 per year, I don't call that gold plated and ours is certainly not index linked.
Local government redundancy compensation is, at most, 3 x the statutory minimum and many local authorities pay a lot less - ours is currently 2 x statutory minimum and the council want to cut that to 1 x from next April.
The COP, when used and I've experience of it, does prevent the situation of 2 people doing the same job on different terms and, speaking from the point of view of an employee, if you're going to harmonise salaries, I'd rather they were harmonised upwards. It's also useful when sounding out contractors, are they going to be doing the job better and more efficiently to make their cut or are they making their cut simply by paying crap wages to an overstretched de-motivated workforce who will jump ship as soon as something better comes along?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
