Sir Robert Devereux will reportedly enjoy a £1.8 million pension pot when he calls time on his career giving him an instant lump sum of £245,000 with an additional £85,000 following every year, a massive sum that pummels the mediocre UK national wage.
Hopefully, he will go on to do some additional work because most people at the age of 61 are pretty healthy.
If only everyone could dream of the sort of pension he has been secured by the taxpayer.
For the common public, pension ages are being raised and people are working longer to get their pension and it’s essential that the Government sets a precedent and Labour MP’s have rallied upon the move by Mr Devereux that will see him demonstrably better off than many of those still in work.
This will not go down well with pensioners whose savings are evaporating. As ever, it is one rule for those at the top and another rule for everybody else and most of the people his department serve cannot afford to retire at the age of 61 because of their low salaries.
His annual pension payment is about double what most constituents earn in a year and Mr Devereux’s pension by claiming it will hit every taxpayer with a sizeable bill.
This is an unusual sum and hard-pressed families will be enraged to see the size of their bill for Sir Robert’s pension and payouts of this dimension are a thing of the past in the private sector because they’re entirely unaffordable, and at a time when the Government needs to make savings, every penny of public money should be used on essential services, not gold-plated pensions.
The state pension age will be extended to 66 in 2020 before being increased again to 67 in 2028 and the foundations of the increases were devised by Mr Devereux.
The Mandarin is no newcomer to enormous amounts of money being flung his way after getting a £20,000 gratuity in 2013 despite being profoundly scrutinised by the public accounts committee following his management of the Universal Credit scheme.
The civil servant was knighted in 2016 for his services to transport and welfare as well as his voluntary work.
Mr Devereux will retire on his forthcoming 61st birthday on January 15.
He is a typical civil servant, they make the rules but do not have to live by them. Where is the fairness? And what was he knighted for? Doing a job he was more than well paid to do, it appears.
The Labour party under Tony Blair used pension funds as a public pocket especially the trillions in miners pensions which they drained with each budget because the fund’s results were reported a surplus rather than being paid to many men whos retirement proved a living hell through multiple ailments directly connected to their former profession.
They unquestionably looted private pension funds which are why so many schemes failed with the result that many who had paid into those schemes lost everything.
The way the scheme is set up is absurd. We pay contributions that are utilized to pay existing pensioners so there is no fund as such. The people currently working are paying for current pensioners.
You pay for your parents’ and grandparents’ pensions and your sons are currently paying for yours.
It always was an ill-thought out scheme and presently its vulnerability is growing quite obvious. The Tories took it. They make the rich wealthier by taking money from the poor. Corporations in the United Kingdom get more in bonuses than they pay in tax.
The last five Governments have been like cancer to the British people and we need new drugs to combat this epidemic.
It would be pretty reasonable for the retirement age to be placed at 55 for men and women, and that would enable millions of honest hard-working people to appreciate a long retirement while they are in good form, but that goes against government strategy of treating the public like they are cattle.
There is no £1.8 million pot. There is, nevertheless, a debt on the taxpayer to fund this fungus, a pension that a £1.8 million pot would give someone who had worked for it.
Yet another Public Servant on a six-figure wage, retiring on a gold
plated pension at 61 years of age, subsidised by the wealth originators of the Private Sector Taxpayers, the preponderance of who don’t have a gold plated pension to rely on, other than the state pension at the age of 65 which rises to 66 in 2020.
The reason being, the country can’t afford to continue to fund the state pension from age 65, but the policymakers can manage to pay themselves enormous floating pensions at the expense of the hardworking taxpayer.
Let the simpletons of this universe join together and stop these freeloaders in their tracks. What’s good for us is good for them and there must be a cap on these corrupt public pensions and we continually appear to have money for all the incorrect stuff.
Nothing changes. Do not permit him to touch his pension until he is 67.
What a stinking robber he is, he lines his own pocket and steals from the poor, and they knighted the pudenda. No wonder they raised the retirement age for the workers, so the rich can retire early and he will get more pension than a lot of people will make in their lifetime.
No wonder he’s grinning or is it a superior stare? One law for the so-called cream, and another for us common people.
The Pension Age was lengthened so Welfare Benefits could be given to more foreign visitors.
They want us dead before reaching Pension Age and 67 increasing to 69/70. However, the Germans retire at 63, France at 62, Hungary 62.5
What happened to EU Harmonisation?
No wonder he looks so superior. Grinning all the way to the bank while holding two fingers up to the people and it’s sickening and it seems about right, us and them, as it was, as it is, and as it will be, for the foreseeable future, the sad part is these robbers get away with it, as this villain has.
What a shock then, so its all new stuff that the UK public sector has been piggybacking on the rest of the workforce.
The economy was hit back by a banking disaster where its now sliding out, refer to Lloyds court case that another large bank should have been closed back then, through ineptitude.
However government couldn’t have that, so we were all screwed a little, then came 10 years of mini interest rates, only to hit us a little more.
Meanwhile millions of pensioners have been screwed by bad performance of the so-called financial specialists but at this time no one in media ever reported the others side, that’s town halls, civil servants, police et ectera, pension shortfalls, that’s because you are still paying them so they don’t exist because they still get their full whack and the public don’t even know they paid for it.
Not too long back the police marched on Whitehall because their pay increases were fractionally adjusted, guess who caved in?
The cost of civil service pensions is sustained by the taxpayer. There is a tiny bit, which used to be described as the Widows and Orphans fund that is funded by the person, but I don’t know if that is still running.
It worked out to a few pounds a month for most people but you got no benefit from it on retirement if you were still married. If you were single on retirement you got back a tiny lump sum to indicate the amounts made, which was taxable.
The pension cited for this man is his civil service pension which has been completely subsidised by those of us who pay income tax.
Nevertheless, many very senior civil servants became self-employed which permits them to pay far less tax on their large wages.
This civil servant has the largest pension pot in Whitehall and is the mandarin guilty of making us all work longer before we can retire? And Sir Robert Devereux is amongst the dozens of top officials sitting on pension packages of more than £1 million.
The report that 30 top civil servants have racked up the enormous pots comes merely weeks following the news that the state pension age will increase from 67 to 68 over two years from 2037.
The league table of the top ten pots comprises just two women, increasing the chance of a sexism row similar to that which hit the BBC following its gender pay gap.
Former pensions minister Baroness Altmann stated it would cost a private sector worker more than £3 million to get the equivalent package as Sir Robert on the annuities market.
Eyebrows might be raised at the fact that the man in charge of the department for pensions comes so high up the public sector list when it comes to his own pension. Taxpayers will be quite interested to see they are financing these bountiful pension schemes.
Most people would never be able to strive to such valuable pensions and women are poor relations in pensions. Everywhere you look, women miss out and the public sector moved to career average pensions five years ago, but those ten years from retirement age including many on the league table were told their final salary schemes would stand.
Details of the enormous pots were exposed by a media review of Whitehall annual reports, but it only involves those working for central government departments and the numbers savouring such tremendous opportunities would be even higher if those working for quangos and the Ministry of Defence were included.
After Sir Robert, the civil servant with the next best deal is Sir Simon McDonald, permanent secretary of the Foreign Office, whose pot is £1.7 million. He will get £85,000 a year plus a £245,000 lump sum. Next, comes Sir Martin Donnelly, permanent secretary at the Department of International Trade, with a £1.2 million pot. He will get £80,000 a year and a £230,000 lump sum.
The highest-placed woman on the top ten list is Sue Owen, permanent secretary of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. She is in sixth position with a pot of around £1.6 million, which will amount to £70,000 a year and a £210,000 lump sum.
The country’s top civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, comes following her with a pot of about £1.5 million, according to the Cabinet Office’s annual report from 2015/16. This is worth £75,000 a year and a lump sum of £225,000.
The Cabinet Office has not, however, announced its 2016/17 report.
If military figures were added, the table would be topped by Gen Sir Nick Houghton, the newly departed chief of the defence staff. His pot is £3.4 million, which will entitle him to around £150,000 a year and a lump sum of £445,000, according to the 2016/17 annual report of the Ministry of Defence.
This is an out-and-out injustice when 1950s women have had their pensions stripped from paying in since 15 years old amount to losses of over £48,000. The DWP and this man created injustice and severe mismanagement in never notifying these women that their pension ages were being moved on by 5 years and then in 2011 sped forth and pushed on another 18 months so that amounted to over 6 years of pensions robbed.
The 1995 Conservative Government’s Pension Act introduced plans to raise women’s SPA (State Pension Age) to 65, the same as men’s and WASPI women promoted the equalisation with men but they were lied to, handled with total irreverence as family women, carers, voluntary workers.
These women underwent prejudice at work, low salaries and could not belong to company pension schemes. Clearly, the entire country must come out in their support. This is a wrongful violation which Theresa May has to sort out quick otherwise the repercussions will be unprecedented.
What happened to WASPI women will fall on the young of today and in the future, so it affects us all.
It’s completely shameful how these 50’s women have and are still being treated and it’s disgusting the way MP’s now rattle on about prejudice and getting women an equitable say but sign up for and allow this pension disaster to occur.
Women have a pretty powerful vote and I really pray that they vote down any government in office that does nothing about this. This abuse has to end.
But the true prejudice is that 450,000 UK pensioners are refused index linking to their State Retirement Pension solely because of where they live. The frozen pensioner has met all the NI contribution requirements when working like everyone else but is refused their retirement, unlike everyone else.
This is another illustration of the two faced-government administrators using the justification of austerity to deceive the working poor whilst at the same time feathering their own nests and it’s outrageous.
Even former Benefits Agency chief Lord Bichard stated that older people must cease being a negative burden on the country and that Pensions should be linked to contributions to the community as an incentive for people to look after the very old.
He said that the elderly should earn their pensions by doing voluntary work in their communities to avoid being a burden on the state.
Lord Bichard, previously head of the Benefits Agency, made the questionable proposal at a House of Lords debate on how to meet the costs of Britain’s ageing people. But his ideas were branded ‘National Service for the over-60s’ by furious pensioner groups.
The cross-bench rival, a retired permanent secretary at the Department of Education, withdrew from the civil service at only 53 and his taxpayer-funded pension is calculated to be £120,000 a year.
Lord Bichard, 65, illustrated a similarity between the workshy claiming unemployment benefits and retirees drawing their pensions.
He said that they are now prepared to say to people who are not looking for work “If you don’t look for work you don’t get benefits”.
Therefore if you are old and you are not participating in some way or another, perhaps there is some punishment appended to that.
And he called for imaginative concepts such as making old people attend to the really old.
Lord Bichard asked if we are using all of the incentives at our disposal to encourage older people not simply to be a negative strain on the country and to actually be a positive member of the community?
He said that it was quite reasonable, for instance, to visualize a society where civil society was making a larger participation to the care of the extremely old, and elderly people who are not really old could be making a valuable contribution to civil society in that regard, if they were given some encouragement or some credit for doing so.
He later promised to examine the concept more as part of his work for the Committee on Public Service and Demographic Change.
Pensioner groups responded with rage at the recommendation that the old should have to earn their pension following a lifetime of working and contributing taxes.
This amounts to little more than National Service for the over-60s and is utterly offensive. Those who have paid their national insurance contributions for 30 or more years are qualified to draw their state pension and there should be no endeavour to put additional restrictions in their way.
We already have one of the lowest state pensions in Europe and one in five elderly people in Britain live below the poverty line.
Lord Bichard’s remarks were very divisive, attempting to pitch younger people against elderly people when the truth is that the real distinction in our society is among the rich and poor and honestly, Lord Bichard should have thought twice before making such ridiculous and ill-informed comments.
Older people are a hugely positive part of the community and over a third of people aged between 65 and 74 volunteers, a portion that only descends slightly for the over-75s.
In addition, approximately a million older people contribute uncompensated care to family or friends, conserving the state millions of pounds and his views were rather an unusual approach.
Those who have retired have already made enormous contributions to our society and are already the biggest group of charity and community volunteers.
Lord Bichard’s idea smacks of social engineering of a deadly kind. He seemed to be implying that if you choose to stop working, even once you reach the age that society concludes it is prudent to stop, civil servants should evaluate you and determine whether you are fit to be selected to do a job that they decide you should do.
Professor James Sefton, of Imperial College, London, a past adviser to the Treasury, seemed to support Lord Bichard and he informed the committee he could not understand why young people were not taking to the streets in a demonstration because they were financing the older generation and he thought that they should be outraged, also that the deal they were getting was poor.
He additionally implied that the current generation was pretty big contributors to the public purse, whereas past generations had profited from the public purse.
These people are super scroungers, and their pension is equivalent to over 20 standard basic pensions and the House of Lords is a retirement home financed by the taxpayer, and if we’re looking to facilitate cuts we should begin there.
Incredible remarks from a person that draws £120,000 per year from the public purse, this is how the wealthy and privileged in society believe all pensioners past retirement age should be assigned to workhouses for their daily bread, seems like he has been time-warped out of Dickens.
Why don’t we just come to an agreement? All old retired people do a voluntary job and people like Bichard and the likes of him in the House of Lords won’t give up their pension funded by the taxpayer.
Getting rid of the House of Lords should save us a bundle of money.
