‘Global downturn may force States to look at civil servant pensions’
Monday 13th October 2008, 2:29PM BST.
THE future of the civil servants’ final-salary pension scheme has been thrown into the spotlight by plummeting stock markets.
Some see the scheme as one of the key ways of attracting people to work in the civil service, but questions again need to be asked about whether the States and the taxpayer can continue to afford it, according to one industry expert.
And islanders could also be facing retiring later in life as the stock-market crash hits private schemes.
Talking about the civil servants’ pension scheme, Nordben Life and Pension Insurance managing director Paul Cutter (pictured) said that the pot of money to fund it was definitely going to be smaller given the events of recent weeks.
‘The question is going to be for government to think to what extent it wants to carry on funding it at a full level – if they try and fund the losses, we may all have to pay higher taxes,’ he said.
‘The civil servants’ pension scheme is a debt on the community to the extent that we’ve agreed when they retire to pay their pensions.’
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Well………I believe Civil Servants are paid too much and get too much in any event. I’m sure they will be able to afford a cut in their pensions like the rest of the retired people around the world. They have had it too cushy for too long !!
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Is this the ‘politics of envy’ that I hear so much about?
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Anyone would think that public service employees are getting a pension for free, when the fact is that they have 6.5% of their salaries deducted for this sole purpose.
The matter of 6.5% removed from your wages would make it difficult to afford or even contemplate taking out a private pension.
John, as for being paid to much, you obviously don’t know what your talking about, you must see and hear what you want to see and hear and not comprehend the actual reality.
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Does John also believe the earth is flat?
Has he no concerption of what civil servants do and the services we are supplied with by the civil service. Our ‘civil servants’ include radiographers and other health workers, air traffic controlers and other staff who are highly educated highly trained and essential to the running of a modern society.
Is his concerpt of a civil servant dickensian?
Does John actaully accept that those who built our society; who successfully fought for its survival through world war be rewarded for that by poverty in their retirement?
Maybe John thinks that the elderly who have earned their retirement and earned and paid for their pension should be treated like machinery that’s been productive all its life but now old and be scrapped. Perhaps better shot and thus no longer a drain on resouces that they through their efforts buit in the first instance.
Civil servants like all other classes of employed people deserve reward commensurate with their education skills and contribution without which we would all be worse off
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