TELEGRAPH ARTICLE

By Christopher Hope, Whitehall Editor
12:01AM GMT 27 Nov 2006
Britain's top 100 civil servants have a combined pension pot worth nearly £100million, guaranteeing them a healthy income after retirement, according to new figures.
The report from the TaxPayers' Alliance, entitled 'The Hundred Club: Whitehall Pensions', identifies 100 senior civil servants with an average pension of £963,000.
The study found that four senior civil servants had pension of over £2million, while there are 10 senior civil servants with pensions of more than £1.5million.
The average bill for the 14 Whitehall departments surveyed by the Alliance is nearly £7million. The biggest pensions bill for those on the list was £16.3million for the Cabinet Office.
The research builds on a study first revealed in The Daily Telegraph four weeks ago which found that the UK's top civil servants are entitled to an average pension pot of £1.7million.
Five of the top six work or worked for the Cabinet Office, including Sir Andrew Turnbull, £2.6million, Sir Geoffrey Bowman, £2.6million, and Sir Richard Mottram, £2.3million.
Corin Taylor, head of research at the TaxPayer's Alliance, said: "At a time when ordinary workers are facing a squeeze on their occupational pensions, the highest civil servants are awarding themselves gold-plated pension deals and massive salaries.
"It's outrageous that taxpayers' money should be spent on feathering the nests of the Whitehall elite, especially when these departments could be performing so much better. The concept of performance-related pay clearly doesn't extend to the higher echelons of the civil service."
A handful of the civil servants on the list have retired. There are also a number of officials who are under 50 years old, such as Suma Chakrabarti, permanent secretary at the department for International Development, who was born in 1959.
Stephen Yeo, a senior consultant at the actuary Watson Wyatt, said that a £963,000 pension would provide a guaranteed income of £40,000 a year.
News of the taxpayer-funded pension pots was storing up social tensions for the future, he said.
"We already have an 'us and them' situation between the private and public sector," he said.
"In 20 years' time, the public sector will be seen as an incredibly favoured group by a population which will have to save for their retirement."
The Liberal Democrats criticised "incredibly generous schemes for top civil servants". Danny Alexander MP, the party's work and pensions spokesman, said: "These figures highlight the unfairness of hard-working families, who are struggling to guarantee themselves a decent pension, having their taxes used to fund incredibly generous schemes for top civil servants.
"The Government cannot continue to avoid the debate of whether public sector pensions in their current state can continue."
Phillip Hammond MP, the Tories' Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, added:"This is just another example of the growing apartheid in the pension system. While hundreds of thousands of people in private sector pension schemes are finding their benefits down graded, and some have lost their pensions altogether, the public sector continues to receive privileged treatment.
"If pension reform is to be sustainable it must be fair to all sections of society."
The TaxPayers' Alliance used the cash equivalent transfer values of senior officials' pensions at 31 March this year, based on figures from 14 departments' annual resource accounts, including the Home Office, Cabinet Office and HM Treasury.

christopher.hope@telegraph.co.uk

What about austerity, then?

Musashi