Daily Telegraph: £4.6bn council tax for staff pensions

By James Kirkup Political Correspondent

HOME owners are paying nearly £300 a year in council tax to fund generous pensions for local government employees, research claims today.

Pensions for council staff are costing the equivalent of a fifth of all council tax revenues, according to a report by the Taxpayers' Alliance [TPA]. Out of a total £22.2 billion paid in council tax by households last year, £4.6 billion, or 21 per cent, went to the Local Government Pension Scheme, the report claims.

Andrew Allum, the chairman of the TPA, said: "It's unacceptable that ordinary families and pensioners who struggle to pay inflated council tax bills see so much of their money spent on gold-plated council pensions that have all but disappeared in the wider economy.''

But Heather Wakefield, the head of local government at Unison said: "The average pension is just £3,800 a year, falling to £1,600 for women.'

Comments

[John Lindley]

If this is to pay for non-contributory pensions, it underlines the cost of provision for old age. We now expect to live well into our 80s and have an active life in retirement, having stopped work well before our active days are over.
It is the largely non-contributory factor that galls, when to a large extent the pension is paid out of an anonymous fund under amorphous ownership, the accumulation of which having caused no great degree of deprivation to the beneficiary.
It is past time to consider the right for us to expect other people to save for our own old age. Private pensions of the type favoured by the last Conservative government meant that those who draw them do so with the satisfaction that in doing so they are beholden to nobody, family, friend or stranger, for as comfortable time as possible in their declining years.