Letter: Paying for a life given to public service

I AM ashamed to admit that I am a burden on society, which is another way of saying that I am a public-sector pensioner and subject of many adverse comments in recent times.

When I entered public service many decades ago, entry to the pension was obligatory but I was, of course, quite willing to enter. Six per cent of my salary was deducted as a contribution to the pension fund and my employers made a similar contribution.

At that time, the powers of investment of the fund managers were limited to gilt-edged and similar interest bearing securities. However, these were times when the stock market was forging ahead and so the Trustee Investment Act was passed, which enabled fund managers to invest in equities.

Shortly thereafter that seemed to be a wise development because actuarial valuations showed substantial fund surpluses.

Many pensioners thought that they should get enhanced pensions, but the employers claimed, rightly, that the pension entitlement was fixed and they countered the surplus by abolishing the employers' contribution for a short period.

The situation has now been reversed in that actuarial valuations are showing substantial deficits. I appreciate my pension entitlement will remain secure and that any modifications to the scheme will only apply to existing or future employees, but I cannot help wondering what the situation would be if the Trustee Investments Act had not been passed or if the employers' contribution had not been abolished in the boom years.

Graham H Speirs

Dirleton Avenue

North Berwick

VIRTUALLY all the reforms in the Hutton report into public sector pensions (11 March) have been considered by both Conservative and Labour governments across the years and rejected out of sheer political cowardice.

It suggests that civil servants, doctors, teachers and others work longer and contribute more to a pension based on a career average of earnings rather than final-year pay.

Such a reform benefits the lower paid, and public sector workers will still receive a secure pension with employer contributions, which is more than most people can expect.

In his years in power, Gordon Brown irresponsibly hid the true situation from his client state but rising life expectancy requires everyone face the reality of a longer career.

Threatening strikes is an infantile union response because the alternative is for the public sector to decay into the sort of protection racket for existing groups we see today in Italy.

(Dr) John Cameron

Howard Place

St Andrews

YOUR report (11 March) highlighting the need to accept cuts in salaries and work longer and have less of a pension is probably how part of the deficit will be tackled.

There is, however, one glaring omission, the part that bankers (and others) are to play in all this prudence.It seems to me that we have an elite group, in banking in particular, who will play no part in the hardships the rest of us will have to put up with when things go wrong.

The fact that the banks largely created the financial collapse seems to have escaped them. We have a situation globally where we now have financial dictatorships, running banks in a somewhat cavalier fashion to satisfy their own ends. This, of course, at a cost to the rest of us in no small way, when we see the miserable returns on our savings.

To talk about reducing salaries/wages and pensions at the same time as the chief executive of Barclays, (and others like him) receiving 6 million-plus in bonus, not to mention salary, is what one sees in places like Zimbabwe. The excessive levels of remuneration in banking bear no relation to the skills of those involved. There are many high level skills required to operate an economy, many of those of greater value than those in the banking sector, for example, a top-level surgeon, scientist or engineer. Bankers have simply abused their position of trust and have become entrenched in their own importance and greed.

Why should people take cuts in their living standards when they see such gross and obscene inequalities in banking and elsewhere. What will it take to address this glaring, unsustainable wealth divide?

William MacGregor

Buckstone Bank

Edinburgh

WHEN Sir Fred Goodwin left RBS he was thrown a lifebelt in the form of a pension deal worth several hundred thousand pounds.

The RBS wreck was, of course, salvaged by the taxpayer, yet suggestions that Goodwin should pay back this largesse were rebuffed by bank and government on the grounds the deal was part of a contractual obligation and protected by law.

Please can anyone explain how it's possible for the present government - egged on by its cheerleaders in the CBI and elsewhere - to renege on similar contractual obligations to hundreds of thousands of public employees?

R Forrest

Evanton, Dingwall