Britain’s public sector pensions bill is now larger than the size of the U.K. economy after it soared past £2.6 trillion for the first time, official figures show. The Telegraph has more.
The Treasury said NHS pension liabilities alone had climbed above £1 trillion, while the cost of future pension promises to millions of public sector workers including doctors, civil servants and teachers ballooned by £333bn to reach £2.64 trillion in the 2021-22 financial year.
The jump in liabilities was driven by a substantial downgrade to Britain’s growth prospects, which raises the predicted cost of funding gold-plated final salary or career average schemes that offer a guaranteed income on retirement.
Sir Steve Webb, a former pensions minister, described the £2.6 trillion figure as “eye-watering” and larger than the size of Britain’s economy.
He said: “If the economy is growing more sluggishly, then the future wealth of the nation is going to be smaller than you thought. So it’s going to be more painful to pay these promises.”
While millions of public sector workers still benefit from gold-plated final salary pensions, most who work in the private sector rely on defined contribution (DC) schemes that link pension payouts to the performance of financial markets.
There are just 700,000 members of active private sector defined benefit schemes across the U.K., according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). By contrast, millions of public sector workers still benefit from guaranteed DB schemes.
The Treasury figures show NHS pension liabilities now stand at just over £1 trillion. The scheme, which has more than 1.5 million members, is on course to grow even further in the coming years as the Government implements its workforce plan to increase the permanent workforce from 1.4 million to 2.3 million in 2036-37.
It means one in 11 workers could work for the NHS in a decade.
The figures also showed the estimated cost of funding civil service pensions had climbed from £339bn to £377bn in 2021-22. Pension provisions for NHS staff, teachers, civil servants and the armed forces account for most of Britain’s unfunded pensions liabilities.
Worth reading in full.
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Guilty or not, the case is useful for distracting attention from the Unmentionables.
You have a point M A k and if true it confirms the evil and depravity infesting the establishment.
The most telling passage for me is this:
“The judges sound rather tired of trying to get their heads around the case. They write virtuously of having to read “a vast volume of material” (para 17). No wonder it was tempting, even if mistaken, to categorise the medical evidence as an ancillary matter; the tiresome business of going through all the medical evidence bit by bit could thereby be disposed of by the Appeal Court judges, just as it could be by the jury at the trial.”
I rather suspect this is what has overtaken these judges. Basically yet another version of CGAF, too lazy and quite possibly not bright enough to go through pages of medical evidence. Far easier to condemn a poor girl to a lifetime of prison rather than do a job properly.
The real criminals are still free and masquerading as doctors in our hospitals.
That’s exactly it Hux, and they brook no dissent in the Stalinist National Harms Service.
Even hunger can do it.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/justice-is-served-but-more-so-after-lunch-how-food-breaks-sway-the-decisions-of-judges
This case stank from the beginning.
The reason we have cases like this and the Post Office scandal is too many dodgy barristers and judges – particularly judges who were dodgy barristers. And one dodgy judge or barrister is too many.
How is it none of the prosecuting barristers noticed there was something wrong about so many people supposedly dipping their fingers in the Post Office till?
And what about the judges?
Don’t pretend none of them noticed something was amiss?
Medical evidence has a history of being dodgy too and so have the experts who give it – not all mind – but enough and one is too many.
Don’t forget Roy Meadow who invented the Munchhausen’s Syndrome by Proxy theory which was without any scientific basis and trashed in the High Court. And then he gave evidence of a one in a billion or so chance of two children in the same family dying suddenly when the probability was less than one in two thousand – it being more likely that such children might be genetically disposed to dying of sudden death.
And of course we cannot trust anything in medical journals as three British Medical Journal editors proved here: How the case against Andrew Wakefield was fixed – in eight steps
There is free to read explanatory text on each page with five free to view/listen videos and podcasts, with also a paid option.
Euripides has still not been sued by the BMJ and he claims he never will be as it is all true.
When one reads the so-called “confession” on the post-it note it sounds less like a confession and more like the confused rambling of somebody under immense stress as a result of the investigation and the allegations against her. As the author says, accused people under such stress can not only admit to things they haven’t done but actually start to believe they’ve done them. Given the flawed medical evidence, absence of witnesses, absence of forensic evidence, absence of any prior criminal behaviour, absence of mental health issues, and her good reputation among the nurses, then I think the note was not a confession of anything.
I understand the infamous shift rota was a major plank in the “evidence” against her, even though it was presented devoid of context. I go to my local supermarket often. If somebody drops dead in the shop does that make me guilty of murder? That seems to be the level of logic applied in the Lucy Letby case. I really hope and pray that poor woman doesn’t give up hope.
Yes, I agree. I read the post-it note shown in the article in the Telegraph. It certainly gave the impression of someone who was at their wits end with the sadness of all the things she was having to deal with.
She was well-liked by the other nurses and the “statistics” that were presented as another piece of “evidence” have been torn apart by many eminent statisticians as utterly flawed.
I also gleaned from the DT article that the medics who took the matter to the police (or gave evidence – I forget which) have been given life-long anonimity protection.
Anyone who is convinced she is guilty should maybe read ll about poor Sally Clarke –
https://www.markedbyteachers.com/university-degree/law/the-case-of-sally-clark.html
But don’t mention the FACT that her son was jabbed a matter of hours before he died.
The Judge would not allow evidence of that, after hearing expert evidence from… bigpharma.
As I started to read this article, the Matthew Eappen case came into my mind (UK au pair working in US accused of shaking baby and causing death, sometime in the mid 1990s). I wonder now if he was vaccine damaged.
The au pair was Louise Woodward. She was accused of shaking the baby violently, causing brain injury. The defence presented medical evidence showing that the head injury was three weeks old – the bones had started to heal. The jury decided to convict anyway. The judge reduced the conviction from murder to manslaughter and released her.
American juries convict in over 95% of cases, regardless of the evidence; whenever someone in the US is arrested, their defence lawyer will advise negotiating a plea bargain, because nobody gets a fair trial.
The evidence regarding Matthew Eppen was that he had already had a fractured wrist which was an old injury. Louise Woodward was not accused of that but it begged the question – who did it?
It was a question never investigated before or during or after the trial.
It is one of those pieces of evidence conveniently ignored – like the supposed blood sample of Henri Paul, driver of the car which crashed and lead to the deaths of Dodi Al Fayed and Diana Princess of Wales.
The blood sample was clearly switched from a recent suicide as it had extremely high levels of alcohol and lethal levels of carbon monoxide.
The evidence and video evidence of Henri Paul showed he was sober prior to getting into the car.
The blood sample vanished so could not be checked against Henri Paul’s DNA.
It disturbs me when the talking heads (JHB is one of the worst for this) say things like “X was found guilty in a court of law….” as if that was the end of it.
You’d think those experienced in news presenting or journalism in general would be MORE open to the idea that injustices happen and not all that rarely.
This whole case feels very dodgy; I hope all the digging that’s going on (Norman Fenton did a good interview with someone about this case) will raise public awareness because nothing else will shift the wigged ones.
A few months ago I read a very detailed analysis of this case (apologies, I don’t recall the source). It convinced me there were significant problems at the unit that combined were contributing to the mortality rate. For one thing the alleged actions of Lucy would have to have been done in a location in full view of anyone walking past but there was also a lot of data about a sequence of errors that led to each fatality.
I believe this poor woman has been found guilty lest the truth of the situation tarnish the reputation of our impeccable NHS.
If people were to start doubting its sacrosanct status they may feel less inclined to keep funding it ip to the hilt.
It also sounds like her defence team perhaps missed a few tricks that would have placed some doubt in the minds of the jury.
That’s my view, for what it’s worth.
Detailed analysis of the Letby case here that I think some are referring to here … https://lawhealthandtech.substack.com/archive
Thanks for brining attention to this case. From the start doubts were raised,
Did the anonymous grasser,s have to appear in court I wonder ?
A very poor decision made by a broken judicial system. I am sorry for Lucy. She was a scapegoat for a broken NICU. An underperforming dept of the nhs.
“If you are sure that someone on the unit was deliberately harming a baby or babies you do not have to be sure of the precise harmful act or acts; in some instances there may have been more than one. To find the defendant guilty, however, you must be sure that she deliberately did some harmful act to the baby. “
So we have not really progressed much from the bad old witch burning days .
She’s a witch
Are you sure?
Yes
Ok, burn her.
There is very little evidence against her and she has been made a scapegoat for the failings of the CoC Hospital.. I live near there and it has always had a poor reputation.