Next Gen News

I am a relatively low-ranking civil servant (the top banana in my department gets nearly six times my salary) shortly before retirement. Because I didn 't join the service until my early 20s I did' t get the full "gold" pension that people think outside the public service, we all get (editorial, June 30). An official in the "classic" working retirement have 40 years would retire on half pay.

Officials get don 't many perks. We don 't get a company car, private health insurance, employee discounts and the like. We have a day off for the Queen 's birthday, a half-day holiday around Easter and the good. But I don 't see the pension as a benefit. The pension is a reward for a long period between the public service, in many cases spent, the government 's dirty work, try the politicians put' ill-conceived, crazy plans into practice and getting the blame if they fail .

I 've to hear vox pop on the radio, people are complaining about the suspension of such self-serving public servants caused take of working mothers with free up to one day or make expensive child care because of school closures and delays for travelers, made by the immigration, driving tests. But that just shows how important and necessary in the public service to have the smooth flow of people 's life and the economy. And what's a little recognition for a change? The only time in the public service shall receive no notice if they aren 't there to do their jobs.

Bob Ross

London

• I'm old enough to remember a time when private sector pension plans were so full of money that the employees received a "payment holiday" from time to time. The teachers' unions, and I was a member, deplored the fact that if our pensions were financed in the same manner, benefits could be higher or articles could be reduced. We didn 't get our way, of course, we learned that our less favorable regime had the advantage that we are protected from the danger in any private pension arrangement under warranty, that maintaining the benefits was a charge on general taxation had.

Now the private sector is in trouble and the government says we must share the misery in the bad times though we didn't share in the gains when things were going well: "Heads we win, tails you lose." This "all in it together" stuff is remarkably flexible.

John Parry

St Albans, Hertfordshire

• The present dispute between the state and its people shouldn 't distract pension policy in view of the whole. For example, tax-favored individual pension pots of ? 1.5m unseemly, given the meager age, which many expect to be British. The coalition 's proposed modest expansion of public pensions won' t do and the upcoming opt-in system work will prove to be irrelevant.

What we need is a balanced pension dangle contract between the state and individual, in which the state is a carrot through the merging of the individual 's voluntary after-tax contributions would be subject to a limit. The resulting indexed pension should be roughly twice the current basic state pension. The stick is, of course, would be that the helpless, who would spurn such a subsidized system to a less than worthy to stand retirement.

Mike Bury