On Essentials, the Council’s intranet, there is a staff consultation asking staff what they think about the 3 options that have been put forward for changes to the Local Government Pension Scheme.
Options 1 & 2 are from central government (the Department of Communities and Local Government) and involve varying contributions rises from April 2012. Option 3 is from the local government employer’s association (known as the LG Group) and it proposes keeping the current arrangements until 2014 and then giving staff a choice between a lower pension and higher contribution rate from then on.
We consider that none of the three options on offer are either fair or practical, especially as there are no genuine concerns about the viability of our pensions scheme at the moment. The real threats to the integrity of the LGPS stem from the prospect of contribution increases triggering a large-scale opt-out by current members and the further increased scale of projected job losses across local government removing tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of contributors from the scheme in the space of less than five years.