UK: Don't force us to work beyond 60, say senior officials




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UK: Don't force us to work beyond 60,

say senior officials

By Jill Sherman, Whitehall Editor

Times online, May 16, 2003

Britain’S top civil servants stepped up their opposition yesterday to government proposals to raise their retirement age from 60 to 65.

The First Division Association, which represents the 3,000 senior civil servants, backed a motion opposing a common retirement age of 65 for all public sector workers. It also supported proposals to work with other public sector unions to stop the implementation of the new pension age.

Delegates at the union’s annual conference in London also said that related Cabinet Office proposals could lead to pension cutbacks of up to 25 per cent. John Merson, the union’s pensions officer, said the Green Paper on pensions published last December suggested that the proposed changes would apply only to staff recruited after 2005.

A paper recently published by the Cabinet Office suggests, however, that if existing staff retire at 60 they could lose up to 25 per cent of their pension through changes to accrual rates. Mr Merson said that employees could receive 5 per cent less for every year below 65 if they chose to retire early, in breach of their original contract.

He said that he objected to government assumptions that because people were living longer they should work longer. “I don’t think it is necessarily the case that people who are already in their forties or fifties will live longer,” he said. “I think that scenario is a bit of wishful thinking.”

The Civil Service pension scheme is still based on final salary and is envied by many private sector workers, but Mr Merson said that many civil servants had accepted the lower salaries in Whitehall knowing that they would be able to retire early with a good pension.

Delegates also backed calls for a new Civil Service Act to prevent any further politicisation in Whitehall.

Jonathan Baume, the general secretary, said the union supported all the recommendations in the recent report from the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which called for curbs on special advisers. He said the Government would be better off if it accepted the report.

Ian Chisholm, a member of the union in the Home Office, was one of the 25 senior civil servants to be made redundant in a recent shake-up. He said that ministers had been directly involved in choosing which officials would go. “We are moving in Britain to a much more politically influenced senior Civil Service,” he said.