YOUR correspondent Jeff Williams obviously has it in for the police, armed forces, nurses, firefighters and teachers.
All these groups receive a modest pension after years of dedicated service.
I don't know where he gets his figures from. Most pensions are based on 40/80ths. You work 40 years you get half-pay or pro rata.
The average public pension is £4,000 pa for men and £2,800 for women.
He states that these pensions are funded by vast investments. Actually that’s the real problem.
The government has been deducting between six per cent and 11 per cent from these workers’ salaries and simply spent it to keep down taxation. A false economy and the system has not been self-financing as intended for decades.
It’s not public pensions that you should be knocking, Jeff. They cost less than £4bn pa. Private pension tax relief for the top one per cent of earners (those on £150,000 plus) cost us £9bn last year and the figure for all private pension tax relief is about £20bn pa.
The first thing George Osborne did was to quadruple the amount the really rich could put into their pension pots to £200,000 a year.
This means that bankers etc can get £80,000 tax relief on their pension each year up to a possible £600,000 on the £1.5 million limit. In it together!
HOWARD DAVIES, Holme Road, Highcliffe
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