Review panel recommends slashing top-up pension payments by East Riding Council
CONTROVERSIAL early retirement deals are set to be slashed by East Riding Council.
The plan is for lucrative pension agreements for staff to be trimmed back from November.
-
Councillor Laurie Cross outside County Hall, Beverley.
A review panel was set up after the Mail revealed corporate resources director Sue Lockwood was retiring early in a move that would cost the council pension fund £364,205.
She was the third senior East Riding officer to take advantage of the authority's generous rules.
Now the early retirement scheme review panel's report will be considered by cabinet and full council. Panel chairman Councillor Laurie Cross, from Beverley, admitted taxpayers had been paying too much to allow senior officers to retire early.
He said the main reason was an agreement that early retirees could claim five extra years of service – so-called augmented entitlement.
The panel recommends that be cut to two extra years, which Mr Cross says will halve the cost.
He explained: "If someone retired hypothetically at the age of 55, they could receive five added years of entitlement, as if they were retiring at 60, not 55.
"Our report is proposing to reduce that to two years, not five years.
"You have to try to get a settlement that is fair to the taxpayers and the workforce at a time when big savings are going to have to be made."
But the proposals have been criticised by Hull and East Riding Taxpayers' Alliance co-ordinator Andrew Allison as being far too limited.
He wanted to see the augmented entitlement rule abandoned altogether.
The discretionary scheme was introduced by the authority in 1999. The council admitted in April that the pension pot had been topped up by some £1.4 million after 14 employees were granted early retirement during 2008-9, purely on their age and length of service.
When the East Riding early retirement scheme review panel was announced in May, council leader Councillor Stephen Parnaby said: "There does seem to be a lot of confusion about the current scheme.
"For a start, it applies to all grades across the council. In fact, 92 per cent of all cases since 1999 have been below head of service level. It is a complete myth that it just applies to directors."
8 Comments
View all
by Astonomia, East Riding
Saturday, September 11 2010, 6:50PM
“Give us our money back Sue! It must be so difficult living on such a meagre pension in the leafy village of Hotham (as printed in the Mail) Especially when Hubby, ex- ERYC cheif executive Darryl Stephenson is now a 'consultant with Hardmoor Associates - which also seems to be regisdtered in Hotham. This has recently critisised another council of having 'interfering counillors!) What a wonderful old boy & girl network world we live in?”
by David, Beverley
Friday, September 10 2010, 7:43AM
“Roy, your views seems a little one sided and uneducated but that's only my opinion. I work in the public sector, my take home wage is below that of someone doing a similar job in the private sector but the pension, leave, etc compensate for that. You like many others only see what you want to see, I took the job for what it was and now you want to take away my pension, I'm already looking at a pay freeze. Roy get a life and move somewhere nice, a proper home not that caravan site where you become bored and pick on people who have jobs and houses.”
by Roy, Newport
Thursday, September 09 2010, 10:32PM
“Don't get me wrong. I have nothing at all against local council employees.
If someone wants to retire early there should only be two questions 1) Can I take my pension early and 2) how much will my pension be reduced by to compensate for taking it early.
I belong to two pension schemes. The first does not allow members who retire early to draw a pension until their normal retirement date except if they retire due to ill health. The second does allow a member to retire early and draw a pension provided they are 55 or over. The reduction for drawing a pension early is 6% per year that you take your pension before your normal retirement date.
In ERYC what they are planning is to allow people to draw their pension early and to INCREASE their pension, not reduce it.
Would this happen in the real world of industry and commerce, no, not even with bankers. The only exceptions I know of are where companies are looking for people to take early retirement as an alternative to redundancy.
With the country in the economic mess it is in and the cuts facing local authorities, this is the economics of the mad house. These councillors who have made this reccommendation should be ashamed of themselves.”
by Anonymous council pensions, beneficiary
Thursday, September 09 2010, 9:26PM
“Hold your nauseating and sour grapes noise Roy, you envious windbag. We at the council do a sterling job. We work relentlessly from 10.00 am until 12.00 am, break for lunch, and we're always back by three without fail. Then we slog it out until 4.00 pm and retire exhausted to a comfy mattress stuffed with public money, except on Fridays of course when we finish at lunchtime. Unless of course we have saved up our tea-breaks, wherein under the flexi job-share system, we can take a maternity sabbatical for a full pay decade in lieu of the council's "you're a long time dead" policy. Does that make things clearer?”
by Roy, Newport
Thursday, September 09 2010, 1:06PM
“Oh, Councillor Cross is a Labour party member, a party recognised for financial profigacy who have taxed private and corporate pensions almost out of existence to prop up public sector pensions that would otherwise be completely unaffordable.”