My classroom has a box with 5-6 non-working laptops in it. Each other classroom has similar. There is no one to look at them, nor a budget to pay for anyone offsite to look at them. Nor a budget to order parts even off the offchance that anyone did. Meanwhile we are short of laptops. Teachers queue to get Online. Then queue at the printer to get materials. This is what "protecting the Frontline" means in practice.
My classroom has a box with 5-6 non-working laptops in it. Each other classroom has similar. There is no one to look at them, nor a budget to pay for anyone offsite to look at them. Nor a budget to order parts even off the offchance that anyone did. Meanwhile we are short of laptops. Teachers queue to get Online. Then queue at the printer to get materials. This is what "protecting the Frontline" means in practice.
Yup - the problem is the concept is broken. And very outdated.
Trying to fix laptops locally is a waste of resources. What you should have is a "float" of computers, ready to go. Broken computer - in the provided cardboard box to post to the support hub for the area. Sending it triggers another laptop arriving for the "float"
All data is either remote, or you are using a VDI. You login to the new machine - either downloads all your data again, or simply connects you to the VDI.
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents and other living costs skyhigh, what is the practical alternative?
Subsidising low pay is something I support (and indeed voted to introduce as income credit under Gordon Brown). If the Government is paying X £N in Job Seekers' Allowance, and X can't get a job because X's skills are limited and only worth say £6/hour to an employer, then it makes sense IMO to subsidise X with, say, half of N. The Government saves half the money, X gets back into the workforce, and the employer is able to get a marginally valuable job done. Obviously we hope that X's skills can be helped with training, or that after getting this job another one appears with better pay. But just paying X £N to do nothing doesn't seem sensible if they are close to being able to work.
It becomes a mechanism to suppress wages - effectively a transfer to the employer. Educate the individuals and train them to increase their value added
This. Not to mention the madness of demanding people don't work more than x hours a week. By removing benefits if they do at nearly the same rate they get extra money.
Hands up those who would work on a building site for £0.50 an hour, effective rate of pay?
It's the kicking in of prescriptions, dental charges, Council Tax (£120 per month here on a Band A property), 55% deductions, etc. The taper rate is approaching a 75% marginal tax rate. Not much left for Taco Bell.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
Yep. That'll be why we have 2 working printers in our school, and spend inordinate amounts of time wasted every day finding a laptop which works.
You don't need a 6 figure pay for that - but expecting to find people on the minimum wage + 50p an hour is a joke.
See. You get the problem. More and more are. It is fundamentally about frustration at not having the basic tools to do the job. Which is a function of pay. If we had an IT team who were paid more than your average computer repair shop technician it would be OK. But we don't. Simply taking on an IT apprentice on the minimum wage of a 16 year old, and not giving them a budget to order parts next day on Amazon Prime doesn't cut it.
Looking at the issue - nearly all companies of any size have realised that having any unique data/configuration on an employee's actual computer on the their desk is a fail.
The bank where I work (for example), uses VDIs - that is, the local machine is just for logging into the a remote system which provides a virtual computer to work on.
So if the local machine dies, log in from any other machine. On the planet. Nothing is lost - the VDI is in the same state as the moment the connection went down.
All support is then remote and centralised, apart from pulling another local machine out of the box if it dies, and keeping the local network running.
On the other hand - I work in research where someone might have a new networking protocol on their machine, might need a terrabyte of ram each time they run a simulation. Or need to spin up a virtual nano-lithography interface. Or might need to qemu a new type of CPU, or ....
It's hard to generalise outside of the median.
At the same time, we're being pushed to just have off the shelf 'Dell Laptops' for all our staff and to ask permission to run 'non standard' software (ie, every single thing they do). And the people doing cutting-edge research just disconnect from the system. Which is less than ideal as they're the ones we really need,
Office admin who needs office and Chrome - fine. But it's a dead hand on the tiller for the rest.
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents and other living costs skyhigh, what is the practical alternative?
Subsidising low pay is something I support (and indeed voted to introduce as income credit under Gordon Brown). If the Government is paying X £N in Job Seekers' Allowance, and X can't get a job because X's skills are limited and only worth say £6/hour to an employer, then it makes sense IMO to subsidise X with, say, half of N. The Government saves half the money, X gets back into the workforce, and the employer is able to get a marginally valuable job done. Obviously we hope that X's skills can be helped with training, or that after getting this job another one appears with better pay. But just paying X £N to do nothing doesn't seem sensible if they are close to being able to work.
Yes but. We have a labour shortage. There are unskilled posts across the northeast at minimum wage and quite a bit above unfilled. Very few are paid to do nothing. Even fewer would be if wages weren't so low.
Well, yes - that wasn't the case when it was introduced, though, and might not be again. In my hypothetical example, if X is skilled enough to get an unsubsidised job, great, but if not...? As StillWaters suggests, the theoretical answer is to train X to have greater skills, but that's often easier said than done unless the entire education system improves,
There is a huge scope for saving money in the Public Sector. Unfortunately it involves an outlay of money spent in the Public Sector. Which will be decried as "waste". And "unaffordable." You can't penny pinch and ignore issues and botch repairs and go for the cheapest sticking plaster every time on your property for over a decade and expect it to keep working efficiently. Why should a school or hospital work differently?
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
They are ridiculously underpaid compared to other roles in local councils which require far less qualification, training and judgement.
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents and other living costs skyhigh, what is the practical alternative?
Subsidising low pay is something I support (and indeed voted to introduce as income credit under Gordon Brown). If the Government is paying X £N in Job Seekers' Allowance, and X can't get a job because X's skills are limited and only worth say £6/hour to an employer, then it makes sense IMO to subsidise X with, say, half of N. The Government saves half the money, X gets back into the workforce, and the employer is able to get a marginally valuable job done. Obviously we hope that X's skills can be helped with training, or that after getting this job another one appears with better pay. But just paying X £N to do nothing doesn't seem sensible if they are close to being able to work.
Yes but. We have a labour shortage. There are unskilled posts across the northeast at minimum wage and quite a bit above unfilled. Very few are paid to do nothing. Even fewer would be if wages weren't so low.
Well, yes - that wasn't the case when it was introduced, though, and might not be again. In my hypothetical example, if X is skilled enough to get an unsubsidised job, great, but if not...? As StillWaters suggests, the theoretical answer is to train X to have greater skills, but that's often easier said than done unless the entire education system improves,
Well indeed. Won't hold my breath for the last six words.
"In all scenarios, there is a rapid fall in inflation from February 2023, which is due to the drop out of the high inflation figures in the corresponding months this year. However, inflation will remain well above 3% for the whole of 2023 and NIESR’s current forecast is that it will not return to target until mid-2025. This forecast assumes that geopolitical tensions do not deteriorate. An escalation of the war in Ukraine and direct involvement of NATO (for example conflict of Russia directly with Poland – a higher possibility now given the events of yesterday – or the Baltic states) would rapidly deteriorate the picture for inflation. Looking east, if the rising tensions between the US and China lead to an intensification of the trade war or even open military conflict in the South China sea or Taiwan (Republic of China), world supply chains would be disrupted, and inflation significantly raised."
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
Yep. That'll be why we have 2 working printers in our school, and spend inordinate amounts of time wasted every day finding a laptop which works.
You don't need a 6 figure pay for that - but expecting to find people on the minimum wage + 50p an hour is a joke.
See. You get the problem. More and more are. It is fundamentally about frustration at not having the basic tools to do the job. Which is a function of pay. If we had an IT team who were paid more than your average computer repair shop technician it would be OK. But we don't. Simply taking on an IT apprentice on the minimum wage of a 16 year old, and not giving them a budget to order parts next day on Amazon Prime doesn't cut it.
Looking at the issue - nearly all companies of any size have realised that having any unique data/configuration on an employee's actual computer on the their desk is a fail.
The bank where I work (for example), uses VDIs - that is, the local machine is just for logging into the a remote system which provides a virtual computer to work on.
So if the local machine dies, log in from any other machine. On the planet. Nothing is lost - the VDI is in the same state as the moment the connection went down.
All support is then remote and centralised, apart from pulling another local machine out of the box if it dies, and keeping the local network running.
On the other hand - I work in research where someone might have a new networking protocol on their machine, might need a terrabyte of ram each time they run a simulation. Or need to spin up a virtual nano-lithography interface. Or might need to qemu a new type of CPU, or ....
It's hard to generalise outside of the median.
At the same time, we're being pushed to just have off the shelf 'Dell Laptops' for all our staff and to ask permission to run 'non standard' software (ie, every single thing they do). And the people doing cutting-edge research just disconnect from the system. Which is less than ideal as they're the ones we really need,
Office admin who needs office and Chrome - fine. But it's a dead hand on the tiller for the rest.
I've got full admin on the VDI. Requesting RAM is phone call. Disc space is "Fuck, you've asked twice in the last year. I've given you {expunged} Terabytes."
Performance is another variable - onetime a chap rang me up to ask about something I was doing. It turned out that a process had spawned a bit, and I was taking up a non-single digit amount of compute in the data centre. Because they had given me a performance setting on the "If you asks, you gets" basis.
If you go Full Admin, they tell you that if some things go wrong, you fix it yourself or get a full wipe that saves the data, but wipes the apps.
Sure for certain kinds of hardware stuff*, you need complete hardware control. But even then, you can save by having the machines racked centrally and accessed remotely.
All solutions are about the 90%. Then you have a solution for 90% of the 10%. Then you have.....
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents and other living costs skyhigh, what is the practical alternative?
Subsidising low pay is something I support (and indeed voted to introduce as income credit under Gordon Brown). If the Government is paying X £N in Job Seekers' Allowance, and X can't get a job because X's skills are limited and only worth say £6/hour to an employer, then it makes sense IMO to subsidise X with, say, half of N. The Government saves half the money, X gets back into the workforce, and the employer is able to get a marginally valuable job done. Obviously we hope that X's skills can be helped with training, or that after getting this job another one appears with better pay. But just paying X £N to do nothing doesn't seem sensible if they are close to being able to work.
It becomes a mechanism to suppress wages - effectively a transfer to the employer. Educate the individuals and train them to increase their value added
This. Not to mention the madness of demanding people don't work more than x hours a week. By removing benefits if they do at nearly the same rate they get extra money.
Hands up those who would work on a building site for £0.50 an hour, effective rate of pay?
It's the kicking in of prescriptions, dental charges, Council Tax (£120 per month here on a Band A property), 55% deductions, etc. The taper rate is approaching a 75% marginal tax rate. Not much left for Taco Bell.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
They are ridiculously underpaid compared to other roles in local councils which require far less qualification, training and judgement.
It says much about this country that every single planning officer *isn't* driving a diamond-encrusted Mercedes.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
And £50k is still well above the average salary even in London.
It is taxpayers who would be paying for big pay rises in the public sector
The alternative is simply having no public sector though.
Taxpayers already pay for the average public sector salary to be £28 a week higher than the average private sector salary excluding bonuses. £605 in the public sector a week to £577 a week in the private sector.
Not even considering better pensions in the public sector too
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents and other living costs skyhigh, what is the practical alternative?
Subsidising low pay is something I support (and indeed voted to introduce as income credit under Gordon Brown). If the Government is paying X £N in Job Seekers' Allowance, and X can't get a job because X's skills are limited and only worth say £6/hour to an employer, then it makes sense IMO to subsidise X with, say, half of N. The Government saves half the money, X gets back into the workforce, and the employer is able to get a marginally valuable job done. Obviously we hope that X's skills can be helped with training, or that after getting this job another one appears with better pay. But just paying X £N to do nothing doesn't seem sensible if they are close to being able to work.
It becomes a mechanism to suppress wages - effectively a transfer to the employer. Educate the individuals and train them to increase their value added
This. Not to mention the madness of demanding people don't work more than x hours a week. By removing benefits if they do at nearly the same rate they get extra money.
Hands up those who would work on a building site for £0.50 an hour, effective rate of pay?
It's the kicking in of prescriptions, dental charges, Council Tax (£120 per month here on a Band A property), 55% deductions, etc. The taper rate is approaching a 75% marginal tax rate. Not much left for Taco Bell.
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents and other living costs skyhigh, what is the practical alternative?
Subsidising low pay is something I support (and indeed voted to introduce as income credit under Gordon Brown). If the Government is paying X £N in Job Seekers' Allowance, and X can't get a job because X's skills are limited and only worth say £6/hour to an employer, then it makes sense IMO to subsidise X with, say, half of N. The Government saves half the money, X gets back into the workforce, and the employer is able to get a marginally valuable job done. Obviously we hope that X's skills can be helped with training, or that after getting this job another one appears with better pay. But just paying X £N to do nothing doesn't seem sensible if they are close to being able to work.
It becomes a mechanism to suppress wages - effectively a transfer to the employer. Educate the individuals and train them to increase their value added
This. Not to mention the madness of demanding people don't work more than x hours a week. By removing benefits if they do at nearly the same rate they get extra money.
Hands up those who would work on a building site for £0.50 an hour, effective rate of pay?
It's the kicking in of prescriptions, dental charges, Council Tax (£120 per month here on a Band A property), 55% deductions, etc. The taper rate is approaching a 75% marginal tax rate. Not much left for Taco Bell.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
And £50k is still well above the average salary even in London.
It is taxpayers who would be paying for big pay rises in the public sector
The alternative is simply having no public sector though.
Taxpayers already pay for the average public sector salary to be £28 a week higher than the average private sector salary excluding bonuses. £605 in the public sector a week to £577 a week in the private sector.
Not even considering better pensions in the public sector too
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
And £50k is still well above the average salary even in London.
It is taxpayers who would be paying for big pay rises in the public sector
The alternative is simply having no public sector though.
Taxpayers already pay for the average public sector salary to be £28 a week higher than the average private sector salary excluding bonuses. £605 in the public sector a week to £577 a week in the private sector.
Not even considering better pensions in the public sector too
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
That's all correct. I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
I can only speak from personal experience; I did 10 years in the public sector doing a professional level job, and from this I will receive a pension at around £6k per year after retirement. If I had carried on for another 3 decades without ever getting promoted I would be in line for a pension of £24,000 upon retirement.
The problem is not to do with the public sector pensions, it is to do with a deficit in the private sector where people haven't made good enough provision for their pension.
Personally I would want to go for an situation where everyone gets a career average pension at the rate of 1/60th per year worked underwritten by the state - they have this in some European countries, like Finland.
Only about 8 weeks to go until inflation begins to fall rapidly, according to the report I posted below.
Let's hope it happens, because it should have a major impact on the strikes situation.
I’m not sure that’s right. The 10%-plus inflation has already happened. The 3% or whatever inflation we get will be on top of that higher base, which the unionised workers will want to catch up on.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
That's all correct. I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
The figures used for the career average are adjusted for inflation, aren't they? So your 1982 8k is counted as whatever 8k would be in your retirement year when calculating your average...
Only about 8 weeks to go until inflation begins to fall rapidly, according to the report I posted below.
Let's hope it happens, because it should have a major impact on the strikes situation.
I’m not sure that’s right. The 10%-plus inflation has already happened. The 3% or whatever inflation we get will be on top of that higher base, which the unionised workers will want to catch up on.
Correct, but it's about the optics. A union asking for 10% when headline inflation is 10% gets a more sympathetic public hearing than one asking for 10% when headline inflation is 3%.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
In the current job market, Council planning officers are generally being paid more than those employed by property developers. Senior/Principal level Council planning officers will be hired at around 40-50k. But Council's cannot fill these posts so they have to hire contractors at up to £60 per hour, which is about £90k per year.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
In the current job market, Council planning officers are generally being paid more than those employed by property developers. Senior/Principal level Council planning officers will be hired at around 40-50k. But Council's cannot fill these posts so they have to hire contractors at up to £60 per hour, which is about £90k per year.
I see the Russians have dispersed their bombers at the Saratov air base, supposedly amongst their premier bases. Not showing a lot of faith in their air defence systems.
AD can only be employed on a large scale where the area is denied to civilian traffic. The Russians would have to close Gargarin International (possibly for the duration of the SMO) to secure the base at Saratov and that would bring the war home in a way they don't want.
Russian AD (S-300, S-400, etc.) are some of the systems that have come out of the SMO with burnished reputations. Both sides have them and both sides can do almost no tactical aviation over the FEBA and are struggling to supress them so they are working as advertised.
I see the Russians have dispersed their bombers at the Saratov air base, supposedly amongst their premier bases. Not showing a lot of faith in their air defence systems.
AD can only be employed on a large scale where the area is denied to civilian traffic. The Russians would have to close Gargarin International (possibly for the duration of the SMO) to secure the base at Saratov and that would bring the war home in a way they don't want.
Russian AD (S-300, S-400, etc.) are some of the systems that have come out of the SMO with burnished reputations. Both sides have them and both sides can do almost no tactical aviation over the FEBA and are struggling to supress them so they are working as advertised.
Against Russian kit. Yet to be given a serious trial against recent NATO stuff.
FWIW, I think there’ll be a serious rethink of AD after the Ukraine experience.
The high end stuff is necessary, but there’s a real deficit in anti-drone weapons - and also a recognition that much larger stocks of midrange stuff is needed for extended conflicts.
In the US, inflation numbers are sometimes given in relation to last month, sometimes to a year ago, and so on. On our TV, the numbers are sometimes given without the base they are being measured against.
Dave Barry's "Year in Review" is out, and as always you can find many gems in it. For example: "In international news, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lands in Taiwan, strips off her pink pantsuit to reveal a camo pantsuit underneath, swims across the Taiwan Strait and single-handedly destroys a Chinese naval base. At least that’s you would think happened, based on the Chinese reaction to the Pelosi visit, which is to almost start World War III. God only knows what would have happened if we had sent, say, Cher." source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/12/25/dave-barrys-2022-year-review/
(I am not a fan of Pelosi generally, but I admire her support for Taiwan.)
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
That's all correct. I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
The figures used for the career average are adjusted for inflation, aren't they? So your 1982 8k is counted as whatever 8k would be in your retirement year when calculating your average...
Yes, and remember that average earnings tend to be on a lower divisor - I'm on 1/49th of inflation-adjusted career average earnings for every year I do, rather than 1/80. I reckon my public sector pension is worth roughly an extra 15-20% - that is, were I to go back to the private sector I'd need an additional 15-20% salary to compensate for its loss.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
There are staff shortages throughout the economy - in all sectors - because about half a million have left the workforce and these are mostly older people at all levels though I suspect it's more likely professional people or middle/senior management.
The small insight I have in this are some from the public sector are moving over to comparable and better paid jobs in the private sector because they need more money now, not in 20 years. Their often specialised and professional jobs are not easy to fill as the public sector can't offer what the private sector can.
The pension was and has always been understood to me the main method of recruitment and retention in the public sector. If you work hard for 35-40 years and have paid in to your pension (along with your employer), why shouldn't you be entitled to the benefits? There may be some questions asked about the benefits accrued to some very senior public sector figures such as Council CEOs but most lower-level workers have worked hard and whether their loyalty is down to the pension or to their sense of public duty, they should be entitled to that to which they are entitled.
The solution to this is not to 'take back the pensions' of the beneficiaries of final salary pension schemes, but to tax those with significant incomes in retirement, be it accrued through public or private sector pension schemes. The problem is, as I have pointed out many times before, that you can realistically find yourself recieving a double income of 100k in retirement against which you only pay about 15k tax. That works out about 7k per month. These people should be paying something like National Insurance, at least.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
There are staff shortages throughout the economy - in all sectors - because about half a million have left the workforce and these are mostly older people at all levels though I suspect it's more likely professional people or middle/senior management.
The small insight I have in this are some from the public sector are moving over to comparable and better paid jobs in the private sector because they need more money now, not in 20 years. Their often specialised and professional jobs are not easy to fill as the public sector can't offer what the private sector can.
The pension was and has always been understood to me the main method of recruitment and retention in the public sector. If you work hard for 35-40 years and have paid in to your pension (along with your employer), why shouldn't you be entitled to the benefits? There may be some questions asked about the benefits accrued to some very senior public sector figures such as Council CEOs but most lower-level workers have worked hard and whether their loyalty is down to the pension or to their sense of public duty, they should be entitled to that to which they are entitled.
The solution to this is not to 'take back the pensions' of the beneficiaries of final salary pension schemes, but to tax those with significant incomes in retirement, be it accrued through public or private sector pension schemes. The problem is, as I have pointed out many times before, that you can realistically find yourself recieving a double income of 100k in retirement against which you only pay about 15k tax. That works out about 7k per month. These people should be paying something like National Insurance, at least.
The number of such people is tiny.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
Ah, the old Silver Bullet Fallacy: because this measure will only have a small impact, we shouldn't bother doing it.
Ni - it should be done but let's not pretend it provides all the cash needed to solve all of our problems . For that as for most things a lot of extra tax is needed from a lot of people on much more modest incomes be they work or pension incomes.
Thousands of middle-class families could face an effective tax rate of up to 96 per cent next year because of a crossover of two child welfare systems.
The Resolution Foundation think tank has warned that a “collision” between the income levels at which universal credit and child benefit are withdrawn will mean a steep increase in the number of families hit.
The benefits cliff-edge is the result of the decade-long cash freeze of the £50,000 income threshold when child welfare begins to be tapered off. Only one parent has to be earning above this threshold before the benefits start to be clawed back under the “high income child benefit charge”.
Thousands of middle-class families could face an effective tax rate of up to 96 per cent next year because of a crossover of two child welfare systems.
The Resolution Foundation think tank has warned that a “collision” between the income levels at which universal credit and child benefit are withdrawn will mean a steep increase in the number of families hit.
The benefits cliff-edge is the result of the decade-long cash freeze of the £50,000 income threshold when child welfare begins to be tapered off. Only one parent has to be earning above this threshold before the benefits start to be clawed back under the “high income child benefit charge”.
Of course this only arises because of the absurdity of paying means tested Universal Credit to people earning over £50k.
It's beyond outrageous. Single person earning £15k (ish) gets nothing. Not a penny from the state.
Yet someone with 3 children and paying rent in an expensive area gets means tested (!) Universal Credit even when they are earning well over £50k.
It is insane to be paying means tested benefits to people earning way, way above average earnings.
And of course if they weren't getting Universal Credit in the first place then the problem in the article wouldn't exist - because they couldn't lose it as they earn more if they weren't getting it in the first place.
Means tested benefits should end completely at around £30k. No exceptions - no matter how many children and no matter where you live. If you can't afford the rent, go somewhere cheaper.
(NB. There is now the two child rule so no more UC for a 3rd child - but only if born after April 2017. Child Benefit is still paid for every child no matter when born).
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
That's all correct. I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
The figures used for the career average are adjusted for inflation, aren't they? So your 1982 8k is counted as whatever 8k would be in your retirement year when calculating your average...
Yes, that is correct. It does have one perverse effect encouraging early retirement though. Stay employed and get CPI minus 7%, retire and get CPI. Also no Annual Allowance and Lifetime Allowance issues, which are big problems to my full time colleagues.
Only about 8 weeks to go until inflation begins to fall rapidly, according to the report I posted below.
Let's hope it happens, because it should have a major impact on the strikes situation.
I’m not sure that’s right. The 10%-plus inflation has already happened. The 3% or whatever inflation we get will be on top of that higher base, which the unionised workers will want to catch up on.
Correct, but it's about the optics. A union asking for 10% when headline inflation is 10% gets a more sympathetic public hearing than one asking for 10% when headline inflation is 3%.
We are told that we have to abide by the "independent pay body reviews" based on inflation of 3.5% in the spring. I am sure that the same argument won't be used by the government when inflation is 10% this spring.
The high end stuff is necessary, but there’s a real deficit in anti-drone weapons - and also a recognition that much larger stocks of midrange stuff is needed for extended conflicts.
Drones proliferate in the SMO precisely because of the vast number of AD systems in theatre that are so effective.
Dropping grenades with 3D printed tails from a DJI Mavics to kill one muzhik at a time is very inefficient and slow hence the current stand off in Donbas. If either side could assert air superiority they wouldn't bother with the small drones. They would just be plastering those trench systems with CBU and FAE.
Classic of the genre BBC report on the CoL crisis this morning. A poor single mother struggling to afford heating, Christmas and so on. No news on the father of the child (6ish?). And the bombshell - she’s pregnant again! No question from the BBC about who the father is this time, or how he will be supporting in his soon to be child. I presume he just expects ‘society’ to raise the products of his 2 minutes of fun.
I don’t doubt she is struggling. I’m sure she isn’t a bad person. This isn’t really about her, although she may want to reflect on maybe using a condom next time.
No - it’s the lack on interest from the BBC into ALL the circumstances. Why has she ended up in this position?
Life is pretty shit for some people, and the story was partly about charities that help. But the lack of context is terrible reporting, at least in my opinion.
To be fair, it’s very hard to see how anyone could argue with that.
Until HY wakes up
I said ‘argue’ not ‘randomly contradict.’
The surprise was St Theresa of May saying the Tories could still win. Most of the holdouts saying "this is fine" to the shitfest that was their summer are mentalists. So I assume May is saying so as a positioning move - if the party doesn't improve then presumably she points at the mentalists and complains they are still damaging the party.
Feels like the opening shot in their 2025 leadership contest. Not for her. For her sane wing of the party.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Mr. Tubbs, that sounds dangerously like thinking people should be responsible for their actions. Back to Sociology Re-education Camp for you, sir!
[As an aside, it's possible she had all present children and the future one by a husband who suddenly passed away, or each and every one is from a different man who invariably departs. The circumstances are hugely different and the lack of context makes such reporting superficial at best and actively misleading at first].
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Gosh, despite an excellent first name you do sometimes pontificate on things without really knowing what you’re talking about, don’t you.
The other thing worth considering is what Max defines as a solid gold state pension yields in a year what he probably earns in under a fortnight. And good luck to him. But he shouldn't then bellyache about how hard done by he is compared to state-employee pensioners who have worked their nuts off for forty years and are pissed off at being told "you know that solid gold pensioner lifestyle you were sold when we recruited you, you can go whistle for that".
Max is your typical nasty Tory, as long as he is loaded it is "F**k you plebs".
Mr. Tubbs, that sounds dangerously like thinking people should be responsible for their actions. Back to Sociology Re-education Camp for you, sir!
[As an aside, it's possible she had all present children and the future one by a husband who suddenly passed away, or each and every one is from a different man who invariably departs. The circumstances are hugely different and the lack of context makes such reporting superficial at best and actively misleading at first].
There was a Soviet woman after WW2 who was lionised by the government for having 17 children. They made her the poster girl for their repopulation drive and gave her loads of money.
They forgot to mention she was a prostitute.
So she was paid for the sex and paid for the children...
Mr. Tubbs, that sounds dangerously like thinking people should be responsible for their actions. Back to Sociology Re-education Camp for you, sir!
[As an aside, it's possible she had all present children and the future one by a husband who suddenly passed away, or each and every one is from a different man who invariably departs. The circumstances are hugely different and the lack of context makes such reporting superficial at best and actively misleading at first].
The media are only interested in crisis - context and solutions, other than handing out free money have zero role to play.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
There are staff shortages throughout the economy - in all sectors - because about half a million have left the workforce and these are mostly older people at all levels though I suspect it's more likely professional people or middle/senior management.
The small insight I have in this are some from the public sector are moving over to comparable and better paid jobs in the private sector because they need more money now, not in 20 years. Their often specialised and professional jobs are not easy to fill as the public sector can't offer what the private sector can.
The pension was and has always been understood to me the main method of recruitment and retention in the public sector. If you work hard for 35-40 years and have paid in to your pension (along with your employer), why shouldn't you be entitled to the benefits? There may be some questions asked about the benefits accrued to some very senior public sector figures such as Council CEOs but most lower-level workers have worked hard and whether their loyalty is down to the pension or to their sense of public duty, they should be entitled to that to which they are entitled.
The solution to this is not to 'take back the pensions' of the beneficiaries of final salary pension schemes, but to tax those with significant incomes in retirement, be it accrued through public or private sector pension schemes. The problem is, as I have pointed out many times before, that you can realistically find yourself recieving a double income of 100k in retirement against which you only pay about 15k tax. That works out about 7k per month. These people should be paying something like National Insurance, at least.
Another grasping nutjob turns up. Where do these nutjobs get educated or rather get lack of education. Next it will be not paying tax on their bombers on the moon. NUTTER.
To be fair, it’s very hard to see how anyone could argue with that.
Until HY wakes up
I said ‘argue’ not ‘randomly contradict.’
The surprise was St Theresa of May saying the Tories could still win. Most of the holdouts saying "this is fine" to the shitfest that was their summer are mentalists. So I assume May is saying so as a positioning move - if the party doesn't improve then presumably she points at the mentalists and complains they are still damaging the party.
Feels like the opening shot in their 2025 leadership contest. Not for her. For her sane wing of the party.
At the moment, what else can she say? There's an odd psychological thing that partisans have to do, fighting an election campaign that they know rationally is doomed. One of the interesting things about the next couple of years is seeing how people like Trump, Johnson and a dozen Mike Brexit Redwallers do with that.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
That's all correct. I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
Yes and they are greedy grasping Tories who are loaded themselves.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
That's all correct. I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
Yes and they are greedy grasping Tories who are loaded themselves.
Morning Malc, good to see those turnips are still on robust form.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
That's all correct. I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
Yes and they are greedy grasping Tories who are loaded themselves.
Have a heart Malc, some of those poor Tories have just shelled out £260 for tacos. Times are hard don't you know.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
See. One person's "wasted" is another person's "cost of providing statutory services." So, come on. What specifically is the waste you have identified? So far. We have people's entirely legal pensions. Doubtless a diversity officer or two. What else?
I’m explicitly not identifying waste. I’m asking you to say how much you need. Different question.
(FWIW I’d start with tax credits and housing benefit).
Wages which enable vacancies to be filled. We've a full time level 4 position vacant for several months now. Pay is £22k. There have been no qualified applicants in one of the poorest parts of the country.
So where is the £1tn being spent productively?
Based on an average wage of £30k the government could employ 35m people for their budget
It is being siphoned into Tories and theirchums offshore accounts
Classic of the genre BBC report on the CoL crisis this morning. A poor single mother struggling to afford heating, Christmas and so on. No news on the father of the child (6ish?). And the bombshell - she’s pregnant again! No question from the BBC about who the father is this time, or how he will be supporting in his soon to be child. I presume he just expects ‘society’ to raise the products of his 2 minutes of fun.
I don’t doubt she is struggling. I’m sure she isn’t a bad person. This isn’t really about her, although she may want to reflect on maybe using a condom next time.
No - it’s the lack on interest from the BBC into ALL the circumstances. Why has she ended up in this position?
Life is pretty shit for some people, and the story was partly about charities that help. But the lack of context is terrible reporting, at least in my opinion.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
That's all correct. I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
Yes and they are greedy grasping Tories who are loaded themselves.
Have a heart Malc, some of those poor Tories have just shelled out £260 for tacos. Times are hard don't you know.
Max has long since lost the plot on this issue. A shame as he is normally rational. The great majority of these gold plated PS Pensions are modest. I have one better than many asa retired secondary head. It enables me to live in comfort here in SE Spain - in the UK things would be very different!
Classic of the genre BBC report on the CoL crisis this morning. A poor single mother struggling to afford heating, Christmas and so on. No news on the father of the child (6ish?). And the bombshell - she’s pregnant again! No question from the BBC about who the father is this time, or how he will be supporting in his soon to be child. I presume he just expects ‘society’ to raise the products of his 2 minutes of fun.
I don’t doubt she is struggling. I’m sure she isn’t a bad person. This isn’t really about her, although she may want to reflect on maybe using a condom next time.
No - it’s the lack on interest from the BBC into ALL the circumstances. Why has she ended up in this position?
Life is pretty shit for some people, and the story was partly about charities that help. But the lack of context is terrible reporting, at least in my opinion.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
That's all correct. I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
Yes and they are greedy grasping Tories who are loaded themselves.
Morning Malc, good to see those turnips are still on robust form.
Morning Ydoethur, These nasty Tories don't even have any feelings at Christmas, unbelievable. Hope you had a Merry Christmas.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
That's all correct. I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
Yes and they are greedy grasping Tories who are loaded themselves.
Have a heart Malc, some of those poor Tories have just shelled out £260 for tacos. Times are hard don't you know.
They restaurant must have had a large glass door, certainly saw them coming. Just shows how out of touch the clown is , some people are struggling to feed a family for a month on that kind of money.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
That's all correct. I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
Yes and they are greedy grasping Tories who are loaded themselves.
Have a heart Malc, some of those poor Tories have just shelled out £260 for tacos. Times are hard don't you know.
I must have missed something here. What is the taco story?
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
That's all correct. I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
Yes and they are greedy grasping Tories who are loaded themselves.
Have a heart Malc, some of those poor Tories have just shelled out £260 for tacos. Times are hard don't you know.
I must have missed something here. What is the taco story?
People were counting cost of meals in USA and Max informed that he had paid £260 for Tacos in an average London restaurant as you do.
After my deeply critical post of the R4 today program the other day - guest edited by some narcissistic cricketer - I must say the BBC got it spot-on today, guest edited by Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
" I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly."
I think you have forgotten to mention the 3/80ths lump sum. It's important to give the full picture.
The high end stuff is necessary, but there’s a real deficit in anti-drone weapons - and also a recognition that much larger stocks of midrange stuff is needed for extended conflicts.
Drones proliferate in the SMO precisely because of the vast number of AD systems in theatre that are so effective.
Dropping grenades with 3D printed tails from a DJI Mavics to kill one muzhik at a time is very inefficient and slow hence the current stand off in Donbas. If either side could assert air superiority they wouldn't bother with the small drones. They would just be plastering those trench systems with CBU and FAE.
You have to consider the whole range of drones, though, not just the little DJI home brew jobs. They’re just more cost effective for ground attack, and win in terms of numbers, cost, timescale of development, and sheer variety of concepts. And you don’t run out of pilots.
And if you’re planning future AD, they’re just going to get more sophisticated.
Classic of the genre BBC report on the CoL crisis this morning. A poor single mother struggling to afford heating, Christmas and so on. No news on the father of the child (6ish?). And the bombshell - she’s pregnant again! No question from the BBC about who the father is this time, or how he will be supporting in his soon to be child. I presume he just expects ‘society’ to raise the products of his 2 minutes of fun.
I don’t doubt she is struggling. I’m sure she isn’t a bad person. This isn’t really about her, although she may want to reflect on maybe using a condom next time.
No - it’s the lack on interest from the BBC into ALL the circumstances. Why has she ended up in this position?
Life is pretty shit for some people, and the story was partly about charities that help. But the lack of context is terrible reporting, at least in my opinion.
Thousands of middle-class families could face an effective tax rate of up to 96 per cent next year because of a crossover of two child welfare systems.
The Resolution Foundation think tank has warned that a “collision” between the income levels at which universal credit and child benefit are withdrawn will mean a steep increase in the number of families hit.
The benefits cliff-edge is the result of the decade-long cash freeze of the £50,000 income threshold when child welfare begins to be tapered off. Only one parent has to be earning above this threshold before the benefits start to be clawed back under the “high income child benefit charge”.
Of course this only arises because of the absurdity of paying means tested Universal Credit to people earning over £50k.
It's beyond outrageous. Single person earning £15k (ish) gets nothing. Not a penny from the state.
Yet someone with 3 children and paying rent in an expensive area gets means tested (!) Universal Credit even when they are earning well over £50k.
It is insane to be paying means tested benefits to people earning way, way above average earnings.
And of course if they weren't getting Universal Credit in the first place then the problem in the article wouldn't exist - because they couldn't lose it as they earn more if they weren't getting it in the first place.
Means tested benefits should end completely at around £30k. No exceptions - no matter how many children and no matter where you live…
That just moves the cliff edge way down the income scale.
Have you ever heard of a gas core reactor? No not a gas cooled reactor, but a reactor with a gas CORE! This is a concept dating back to the Manhattan Project to just let the core become gaseous (or maybe plasma) instead of solid or even liquid. https://twitter.com/GBruhaug/status/1607921318371934211
" I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly."
I think you have forgotten to mention the 3/80ths lump sum. It's important to give the full picture.
Yes, it is one of several reasons that the original scheme was a much better deal, despite the 1/60 accrual rate of the Career Average earnings scheme, the other being the age that you are allowed to take benefits without actuarial reduction for early retirement.
Classic of the genre BBC report on the CoL crisis this morning. A poor single mother struggling to afford heating, Christmas and so on. No news on the father of the child (6ish?). And the bombshell - she’s pregnant again! No question from the BBC about who the father is this time, or how he will be supporting in his soon to be child. I presume he just expects ‘society’ to raise the products of his 2 minutes of fun.
I don’t doubt she is struggling. I’m sure she isn’t a bad person. This isn’t really about her, although she may want to reflect on maybe using a condom next time.
No - it’s the lack on interest from the BBC into ALL the circumstances. Why has she ended up in this position?
Life is pretty shit for some people, and the story was partly about charities that help. But the lack of context is terrible reporting, at least in my opinion.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
That's all correct. I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
Yes and they are greedy grasping Tories who are loaded themselves.
Have a heart Malc, some of those poor Tories have just shelled out £260 for tacos. Times are hard don't you know.
I must have missed something here. What is the taco story?
People were counting cost of meals in USA and Max informed that he had paid £260 for Tacos in an average London restaurant as you do.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
Yep. That'll be why we have 2 working printers in our school, and spend inordinate amounts of time wasted every day finding a laptop which works.
Feels like the opening shot in their 2025 leadership contest. Not for her. For her sane wing of the party.
JRM has tossed his gibus into the ring this morning. The leadership competition is on. On like Therese Coffey's thong.
If he was leader the party could face opposition for decades sadly.
People said the same about Labour under Corbyn
And they were right. Two major election defeats...
Admittedly, they haven't so far led to *decades* in opposition but if they had been held at normal intervals Labour would have been out of power for around 20-25 years.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
That's all correct. I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
Yes and they are greedy grasping Tories who are loaded themselves.
Have a heart Malc, some of those poor Tories have just shelled out £260 for tacos. Times are hard don't you know.
Max has long since lost the plot on this issue. A shame as he is normally rational. The great majority of these gold plated PS Pensions are modest. I have one better than many asa retired secondary head. It enables me to live in comfort here in SE Spain - in the UK things would be very different!
Total government spending on public pensions is predicted to reach £8.8bn in 2025-26 before falling back slightly to £8.2bn.
That sounds a lot but it's still less than 1% of government spending.
For comparison, Government debt interest payments are 10 times higher.
Feels like the opening shot in their 2025 leadership contest. Not for her. For her sane wing of the party.
JRM has tossed his gibus into the ring this morning. The leadership competition is on. On like Therese Coffey's thong.
If he was leader the party could face opposition for decades sadly.
People said the same about Labour under Corbyn
And they were right. Two major election defeats...
Admittedly, they haven't so far led to *decades* in opposition but if they had been held at normal intervals Labour would have been out of power for around 20-25 years.
Yet in 2017 Corbyn shocked everyone by getting 40% of the vote and a hung parliament. Even in his heavy defeat of 2019 he also still got 32%, which was more than Brown got in 2010 or Ed Miliband got in 2015.
Corbyn may have been toxic to centrist voters but he rallied the left behind him. Mogg equally may be toxic to centrist voters but he would rally the right behind him too.
Now, just 2 years after Corbyn was leader Labour is heading to government again under the more centrist Starmer
Have you ever heard of a gas core reactor? No not a gas cooled reactor, but a reactor with a gas CORE! This is a concept dating back to the Manhattan Project to just let the core become gaseous (or maybe plasma) instead of solid or even liquid. https://twitter.com/GBruhaug/status/1607921318371934211
A design for those who aren't TORY enough.
Up there with the all time greats....
"Hi, we'd like to run our science mini nuclear reactor at your trade exhibition. Actually run it. "
"Er.... ok."
"It's so safe that it is self moderating. So we are going to have Edward Teller yank the main control rod out to try and cause an excursion. But it will all be fine. He will do this a several times a day...."
The days when Men were Men - and asbestos filters in cigarettes was a Good Idea.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
Yep. That'll be why we have 2 working printers in our school, and spend inordinate amounts of time wasted every day finding a laptop which works.
Printers and laptops don't have a union.
Not yet....
The problem is that the school system is working in the old paradigm for computers - laptops are individual and expensive.
The modern concept is to centralise IT as much as possible - the laptops become Chromebooks (or similar) or a way to access a VDI. All data is stored on servers, which have multiply redundant backups as part of normal operations. A laptop dies, and you can fire up any machine as a replacement...
The laptops themselves are cheap enough that you have a pile of them. Centrally fixed/discarded.
Equally, printers should be provided an externally managed resource - you have a several, one goes out, the service guys bring another and plug it into the network.
Trying to maintain technical knowledge and repair in each school is a fools errand.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
Yep. That'll be why we have 2 working printers in our school, and spend inordinate amounts of time wasted every day finding a laptop which works.
Printers and laptops don't have a union.
Not yet....
The problem is that the school system is working in the old paradigm for computers - laptops are individual and expensive.
The modern concept is to centralise IT as much as possible - the laptops become Chromebooks (or similar) or a way to access a VDI. All data is stored on servers, which have multiply redundant backups as part of normal operations. A laptop dies, and you can fire up any machine as a replacement...
The laptops themselves are cheap enough that you have a pile of them. Centrally fixed/discarded.
Equally, printers should be provided an externally managed resource - you have a several, one goes out, the service guys bring another and plug it into the network.
Trying to maintain technical knowledge and repair in each school is a fools errand.
Every school I have worked in runs them in precisely that fashion.
Which works beautifully until the 'bring another' part where it always seems to go wrong...
Comments
Meanwhile we are short of laptops. Teachers queue to get Online. Then queue at the printer to get materials. This is what "protecting the Frontline" means in practice.
Trying to fix laptops locally is a waste of resources. What you should have is a "float" of computers, ready to go. Broken computer - in the provided cardboard box to post to the support hub for the area. Sending it triggers another laptop arriving for the "float"
All data is either remote, or you are using a VDI. You login to the new machine - either downloads all your data again, or simply connects you to the VDI.
The taper rate is approaching a 75% marginal tax rate.
Not much left for Taco Bell.
It's hard to generalise outside of the median.
At the same time, we're being pushed to just have off the shelf 'Dell Laptops' for all our staff and to ask permission to run 'non standard' software (ie, every single thing they do). And the people doing cutting-edge research just disconnect from the system. Which is less than ideal as they're the ones we really need,
Office admin who needs office and Chrome - fine. But it's a dead hand on the tiller for the rest.
Unfortunately it involves an outlay of money spent in the Public Sector.
Which will be decried as "waste". And "unaffordable."
You can't penny pinch and ignore issues and botch repairs and go for the cheapest sticking plaster every time on your property for over a decade and expect it to keep working efficiently.
Why should a school or hospital work differently?
Won't hold my breath for the last six words.
"In all scenarios, there is a rapid fall in inflation from February 2023, which is due to the drop out of the high inflation figures in the corresponding months this year. However, inflation will remain well above 3% for the whole of 2023 and NIESR’s current forecast is that it will not return to target until mid-2025. This forecast assumes that geopolitical tensions do not deteriorate. An escalation of the war in Ukraine and direct involvement of NATO (for example conflict of Russia directly with Poland – a higher possibility now given the events of yesterday – or the Baltic states) would rapidly deteriorate the picture for inflation. Looking east, if the rising tensions between the US and China lead to an intensification of the trade war or even open military conflict in the South China sea or Taiwan (Republic of China), world supply chains would be disrupted, and inflation significantly raised."
https://www.niesr.ac.uk/blog/inflation-set-fall-early-2023#:~:text=In all scenarios, there is,to target until mid-2025.
Performance is another variable - onetime a chap rang me up to ask about something I was doing. It turned out that a process had spawned a bit, and I was taking up a non-single digit amount of compute in the data centre. Because they had given me a performance setting on the "If you asks, you gets" basis.
If you go Full Admin, they tell you that if some things go wrong, you fix it yourself or get a full wipe that saves the data, but wipes the apps.
Sure for certain kinds of hardware stuff*, you need complete hardware control. But even then, you can save by having the machines racked centrally and accessed remotely.
All solutions are about the 90%. Then you have a solution for 90% of the 10%. Then you have.....
*But not GPU
https://nasawatch.com/russia/man-driving-diamond-encrusted-mercedes-caught-embezzling-cosmodrome-funds/
Standard hilarity.
Long-standing PB Tories getting triggered by nothing much (TV dramas, I mean, who cares?)
Russian bots.
Just need aliens and perhaps some ghost action to complete the set.
Let's hope it happens, because it should have a major impact on the strikes situation.
*Ever seen a Zeta Reticulan at passport control? Just sayin'
No they don't.
https://macrohive.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/inf1.png
The problem is not to do with the public sector pensions, it is to do with a deficit in the private sector where people haven't made good enough provision for their pension.
Personally I would want to go for an situation where everyone gets a career average pension at the rate of 1/60th per year worked underwritten by the state - they have this in some European countries, like Finland.
Russian AD (S-300, S-400, etc.) are some of the systems that have come out of the SMO with burnished reputations. Both sides have them and both sides can do almost no tactical aviation over the FEBA and are struggling to supress them so they are working as advertised.
Yet to be given a serious trial against recent NATO stuff.
FWIW, I think there’ll be a serious rethink of AD after the Ukraine experience.
The high end stuff is necessary, but there’s a real deficit in anti-drone weapons - and also a recognition that much larger stocks of midrange stuff is needed for extended conflicts.
"In international news, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lands in Taiwan, strips off her pink pantsuit to reveal a camo pantsuit underneath, swims across the Taiwan Strait and single-handedly destroys a Chinese naval base. At least that’s you would think happened, based on the Chinese reaction to the Pelosi visit, which is to almost start World War III. God only knows what would have happened if we had sent, say, Cher."
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/12/25/dave-barrys-2022-year-review/
(I am not a fan of Pelosi generally, but I admire her support for Taiwan.)
I reckon my public sector pension is worth roughly an extra 15-20% - that is, were I to go back to the private sector I'd need an additional 15-20% salary to compensate for its loss.
Tory chaos made Britain a laughing stock, says Sir Lindsay Hoyle
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tory-chaos-made-britain-laughing-stock-sir-lindsay-hoyle-sch7j0d8w
Thousands of middle-class families could face an effective tax rate of up to 96 per cent next year because of a crossover of two child welfare systems.
The Resolution Foundation think tank has warned that a “collision” between the income levels at which universal credit and child benefit are withdrawn will mean a steep increase in the number of families hit.
The benefits cliff-edge is the result of the decade-long cash freeze of the £50,000 income threshold when child welfare begins to be tapered off. Only one parent has to be earning above this threshold before the benefits start to be clawed back under the “high income child benefit charge”.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rules-punish-uk-families-effective-tax-rate-nn9gj38kl
It's beyond outrageous. Single person earning £15k (ish) gets nothing. Not a penny from the state.
Yet someone with 3 children and paying rent in an expensive area gets means tested (!) Universal Credit even when they are earning well over £50k.
It is insane to be paying means tested benefits to people earning way, way above average earnings.
And of course if they weren't getting Universal Credit in the first place then the problem in the article wouldn't exist - because they couldn't lose it as they earn more if they weren't getting it in the first place.
Means tested benefits should end completely at around £30k. No exceptions - no matter how many children and no matter where you live. If you can't afford the rent, go somewhere cheaper.
(NB. There is now the two child rule so no more UC for a 3rd child - but only if born after April 2017. Child Benefit is still paid for every child no matter when born).
More seriously, they have brought our political system into (even more) disrepute. I don't feel his saying that is partisan.
Dropping grenades with 3D printed tails from a DJI Mavics to kill one muzhik at a time is very inefficient and slow hence the current stand off in Donbas. If either side could assert air superiority they wouldn't bother with the small drones. They would just be plastering those trench systems with CBU and FAE.
I don’t doubt she is struggling. I’m sure she isn’t a bad person. This isn’t really about her, although she may want to reflect on maybe using a condom next time.
No - it’s the lack on interest from the BBC into ALL the circumstances. Why has she ended up in this position?
Life is pretty shit for some people, and the story was partly about charities that help. But the lack of context is terrible reporting, at least in my opinion.
Babies don’t just appear from nowhere…
Feels like the opening shot in their 2025 leadership contest. Not for her. For her sane wing of the party.
Mr. Tubbs, that sounds dangerously like thinking people should be responsible for their actions. Back to Sociology Re-education Camp for you, sir!
[As an aside, it's possible she had all present children and the future one by a husband who suddenly passed away, or each and every one is from a different man who invariably departs. The circumstances are hugely different and the lack of context makes such reporting superficial at best and actively misleading at first].
They forgot to mention she was a prostitute.
So she was paid for the sex and paid for the children...
Good stuff.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly."
I think you have forgotten to mention the 3/80ths lump sum. It's important to give the full picture.
They’re just more cost effective for ground attack, and win in terms of numbers, cost, timescale of development, and sheer variety of concepts.
And you don’t run out of pilots.
And if you’re planning future AD, they’re just going to get more sophisticated.
Have you ever heard of a gas core reactor? No not a gas cooled reactor, but a reactor with a gas CORE! This is a concept dating back to the Manhattan Project to just let the core become gaseous (or maybe plasma) instead of solid or even liquid.
https://twitter.com/GBruhaug/status/1607921318371934211
Admittedly, they haven't so far led to *decades* in opposition but if they had been held at normal intervals Labour would have been out of power for around 20-25 years.
That sounds a lot but it's still less than 1% of government spending.
For comparison, Government debt interest payments are 10 times higher.
Corbyn may have been toxic to centrist voters but he rallied the left behind him. Mogg equally may be toxic to centrist voters but he would rally the right behind him too.
Now, just 2 years after Corbyn was leader Labour is heading to government again under the more centrist Starmer
Up there with the all time greats....
"Hi, we'd like to run our science mini nuclear reactor at your trade exhibition. Actually run it. "
"Er.... ok."
"It's so safe that it is self moderating. So we are going to have Edward Teller yank the main control rod out to try and cause an excursion. But it will all be fine. He will do this a several times a day...."
The days when Men were Men - and asbestos filters in cigarettes was a Good Idea.
The problem is that the school system is working in the old paradigm for computers - laptops are individual and expensive.
The modern concept is to centralise IT as much as possible - the laptops become Chromebooks (or similar) or a way to access a VDI. All data is stored on servers, which have multiply redundant backups as part of normal operations. A laptop dies, and you can fire up any machine as a replacement...
The laptops themselves are cheap enough that you have a pile of them. Centrally fixed/discarded.
Equally, printers should be provided an externally managed resource - you have a several, one goes out, the service guys bring another and plug it into the network.
Trying to maintain technical knowledge and repair in each school is a fools errand.
Which works beautifully until the 'bring another' part where it always seems to go wrong...