Bijilo123

Well - it can be shown to be cost cutting and it is the price of cuting the numbers of civil servants. I worked in the civil service as a contractor for a while and it was almost mandatory to get stressed out at age 50 and get a pension enhancement so this is just an additional 5 years anyway.

If there are any remaining 60 year old civil servants then will thay claim unfair and ask for additional pension payments because they lost the opportunity to leave, fully paid up, when they were 50?

Bijilo123

...examples being?

Sally Redux

Sir Fred Goodwin, $16.9million pension pot.

Seneca21

That's nothing! I spend that on socks every year. Pah.

BristolUK

These are final salary schemes and that is a maximum based on the maximum length of service.

What needs to be remembered is that the vast majority of civil servants are not on high wages.

Their jobs are compared with other similar jobs and the salaries are compared. Then a "fair" salary is decided.

Then a reduction is made to take account of the non contributory pension. This means that despite what the media says about free pensions civil servants are effectively paying for their pensions the same as other people do...they just don't get the higher gross salary from which a deduction is made to begin with.

Of course, what with it being a final salary scheme it means the pension is less than it would be if the real gross level was paid with deductions.

So low pay and low pensions.

As an incentive to go early and save on the wage bill, they are reportedly being offered whatever pension they'd qualify for rather than the reduced pension for going early but with loss of the lump sum.

dunroving

Actually, the empirical evidence shows that for quite some time, public sector salaries have been similar to private sector. The old saw of "they get better pensions schemes to compensate for crap wages" hasn't been true for a long time.

I'm particularly familiar with pay and pensions for teachers and university lecturers and it's certainly true for them, but according to all the current media stories, it's true for government civil servants also.

BristolUK

I'm particularly familiar with the civil service - specifically DWP.

Wages are most certainly still crap there; the majority of staff (clerical grades) well under £18k I believe.

Seneca21

One of my first jobs was British Civil Service and adjusted for inflation in today's money I was earning £11,000 per annum. Full-time, demanding position as well working for very senior people. I'm sure things must have improvedfrom this disgrace, but when people talk about public sector being as high as private they're usually referring to the pigs at the top end of the trough who get to decide their own wages and value they bring to this life. Being human, they radically over-estimate their own worth by several magnitudes of course.

BristolUK

Here ya go

DWP
The salary range for an Administrative Assistant (national scale) is £12,590 - £14,270 (Bristol City Council equivalent £16,054 – £17,161)
The salary range for an Administrative Officer (national scale) is £14,270 - £17,600 (can't find a vacancy for equivalent right now but above and below indicates it's likely several thousand more)

That's most of the people you see and speak to in offices and the people who do assessing.

The salary range for an Executive Officer (national scale) is £18,710 - £23,990 (Bristol City Council's equivalent £31,754 - £34.459)

The pension contributions have to be paid from the blue figures but the extra 20-40% covers that with a few bob to spare.

dunroving

I think you need to write a letter to the Times, including these figures.

Seneca21

This is a good post. I totally believe these figures for the reasons I mention above in my post. 90% of the people in the Civil Service that one would ever have any dealings with will be earning crap like this. Also, when I was in it there was a very weird attitude - insular - cliquey - strange. It was like a never-ending episode of Eerie, Indiana. Treated like shit, crappy old office furniture and equipment. It goes on.

Universities are the same. A FT uni admin will be on maybe 20k if lucky - and even the junior lecturers are only somewhere round the 25 - 28k mark which is nowhere near commensurate to the stress and work levels they have. It's all falling apart.

BristolUK

Last time I did that (as a DSS employee) I was reprimanded.

Horrible chairs that made your trousers grimy while the HEOs had nice chairs/desks. Cabinet drawers that fell on your feet if you pulled them out too far. Office repeatedly fumigated for fleas (from clients) which were inevitably taken home (fleas not clients) cheap carpet fitted that caused static shocks. Despite what people thought no tea breaks. Heating that didn't work in winter and air conditioning that blew out air so cold, the office was freezing. Despite years of assurance there was no asbestos in the building workmen found some. Expected to search for suspect packages in the days of bomb warnings.

Oooh, I've come over all nostalgic.

Seneca21

Ah, fond memories. They found a load of asbestos in the walls of one of the unis I worked at as well.

HumphreyC

100% right.

My first 'real' job was as an admin assistant working for a city council (this was back in 2005). The pay was about 12k per annum but on the plus side they didn't expect me to do any work - and in fact, actively discouraged me from doing any. I felt the people at the top treated those lower down like absolute dirt. They would go off on things like a 'best practice conference' in Venice while the rest of us struggled on on bad pay and in poor conditions (no air con in a poorly ventilated office). The project we were working on was pretty pointless and overspent it's budget and there was a general atmosphere of complete misery. I have a lot of respect for the people who work at the bottom of the state system (I jumped ship for the private sector after six months).

You can guess what will happen now. The fat cats will re-invent themselves as 'Austerity Tsars' and begin slashing their departments left right and center.

dunroving

I find that admin staff do nothing but create work for the rest of us. I'd like to just get on with teaching (like in the old days), instead of spending most of my time completing pointless admin tasks.

We particularly get asked to write endless reports on the same stuff, but in a different format. And then it never gets used anyway, so what was the point?