Tag Archives: pensions

Stephen Tall

Daily View 2×2: 5 October 2009

By Stephen Tall | Mon 5th October 2009 - 9:50 am

2 Big Stories


Tory conference opens, and it’s time to party like it’s 1994

A few thousand Tories are converging on Manchester today, with two issues dominating discussion: Europe and welfare cuts. Ah, and there we were thinking The Major Years were but a distant memory.

On a more positive note, the Tories will be singing today from the localism song-book, with Caroline Spelman championing the party’s conversion to local control of local services – an interesting about-turn for an MP who opposed Scottish and Welsh devolution, and believes central government should impose council tax freezes from Whitehall.

Ministerial …

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Stephen Tall

Lib Dems force government climbdown on MPs’ pension increases

By Stephen Tall | Thu 25th June 2009 - 10:00 am

As the BBC reports:

Plans to raise taxpayers’ contributions to MPs’ pensions have been dropped, ahead of a Commons debate. A planned increase had been accepted by all parties in March but the government now says it will accept a Lib Dem plan to freeze the amount from public funds.

The proposal would have seen MPs’ own contributions rise by £60 a month, but the Lib Dems said taxpayers would have paid £750,000 more than last year. All party leaders have indicated that MPs’ final salary schemes must end.

The cost to the Treasury of MPs’ pensions has risen from

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Alex Foster

Latest pension scandal to rock government

By Alex Foster | Sun 4th January 2009 - 11:45 am

Rupert Jones reports for the Guardian:

… government ministers’ pension pots are defying the stock market slump and are up by 10% in a year, it emerged this week. Research by the Liberal Democrats revealed that high-profile ministers have pension pots worth more than 10 times the average in the private sector. Gordon Brown has a personal ministerial pension pot of £274,000. Justice secretary Jack Straw’s is £294,000 and chancellor Alistair Darling’s is £235,000. Lib Dem work and pensions spokesman Lord Oakeshott says: “Ministers and mandarins live in a pensions time warp. They look like the first world war general

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