A major report released yesterday on public sector pension reform suggesting that state employees pay more and work longer for less benefit has produced a predictable reaction from staff organisations both here and in the UK.

And who can blame them? The prospect of losing a gold-plated pension funded largely by the taxpayer and providing an income way ahead of that available in the private sector is not appealing.

Yet the Hutton report in many respects does not go far enough because it still links pension to salary rather than to what employer and employee have contributed, leaving the taxpayer to pick up any shortfall.

It is, however, a significant improvement over the current blank cheque approach Guernsey has where its public sector has its retirement bankrolled by islanders while leaving them out of pocket and with significantly worse arrangements themselves.

This pensions apartheid is morally wrong, unsustainable and in urgent need of change.

Yet because so many deputies, officials and their advisers directly benefit from the scheme, there is no desire to change it because, well, it’s only taxpayers’ money.

The sums can be quite extraordinary. To provide the final salary-based pensions of the Crown Officers, for example, the taxpayer has to provide nearly one quarter – 23.1% – of salary while the individual contribution is just 7.5%.

So the taxpayer puts in more than three times the money, well ahead of private sector norms, and it is still not enough. The top paid public servants would contribute on the most generous assumptions £300,000 during their career. Islanders, as employers, put in £924,000 on top of salary.

That notional total of £1.2m is then supposed to fund an index-linked pension of, say, £100,000 a year.

A leading actuary calculated for us that the actual pension pot needed to do so is in excess of £2m. But the £800,000 shortfall to be bridged through investment growth and taxpayer subsidy is actually far greater.

The figures here are extreme maximums and the amount pre-funding the pension is far less – and the balance has to be found by taxpayers already struggling to pay their bills.

This might be a top-of-the-range example but the funding gulf is across the board.

Which is why it has to end.