Despite the massive tax allowance subsidy to private pensions over many years, more than half of British private sector workers have no pension at all, as Iain Macwhirter acknowledges ("Madness for public sector to go on strike over pensions", The Herald, June 30).
Surely the remedy lies in sorting the chaos in private pensions rather than wrecking the public system.
Memories of Stock Exchange tipsters greedily advising share purchases to allow shareholder access to, and distribution of, a company’s pension fund, or of pension holidays in a boom followed by a bale-out in the bust, still linger with some of us.
The ideological mantra of deregulation, regardless of circumstance, has much to answer for. This allowed, for example, the skilled domestic housing experts, the Dunfermline Building Society, to over-commit in the commercial property arena. With the previously-solid Barings to punt on the Japanese economy in Singapore and the House of Lords deciding that, in the insurance mutual Equitable Life, some members were entitled to a more equitable share than others, we lived in interesting times.
In the public sector, under the last Government, agreement has already been reached on a formula for increasing pension contributions by members to compensate for increased longevity, and new entrants to teaching will have to wait until the age of 65, not 60, for their pensions. Moreover, the figures for public pensions expenditure show a declining burden on the state in future years. Surely we have the basis for a settlement.
In education, the McCrone settlement was introduced when it was realised that large numbers of the teaching profession, recruited in the 1970s, were due to retire, and that the pay scales, by then diminished by many years of below-inflation pay settlements, were inadequate to entice the highly qualified. Clearly, persuasive mathematicians have found it easier, and more rewarding, to face and convince the board of directors of the virtues of dodgy derivatives than to repeatedly face classes of 30 scholars throughout the day.
The deficiencies of the private pension system, as Iain Macwhirter points out, need remedy, but, in the long term, a well-ordered, independently-regulated system at which tax subsidy is directed, is probably the answer. Perhaps also, the reintroduction of the concept of trustee investments, legally required in the days when banking was the field of the qualified professional, might curb the wilder “go-go” investment urges of trustees and their brokers.
David Gray,
Westbourne Gardens Lane, Glasgow
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