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More growth in public and private pensions divide
2 October 2008 16:41
The gulf between public and private sector final salary pensions grew again in 2007, it has been revealed.
Data released by the Office for National Statistics showed that the number of active members in public sector final salary schemes had increased to over five million, compared to those in private sector schemes, which weakened by 300,000 to 2.7 million.
The majority of final salary schemes in the private sector are no longer open to new applications, with many employees instead turning to defined contribution pensions, which have an input rate of just over nine per cent.
A former government pensions advisor, Ros Altmann told the Daily Mail that public sector pension schemes seemed immune to external financial turmoil.
He added that there was a pensions apartheid, with 20 per cent of the public sector workforce are keeping benefits that everybody else is losing.
Pensioners in the UK only have four days to submit an application to claim back a year's worth of backdated pension credit entitlement, before the government reduces the backdating period to three months.
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