Another issue is that the NHS pensions pot is in £2bn surplus. They don't need to raise pensions at the moment. As far as I can see, it's just more tax for no good reason other than to use it other purposes.

Also over the past five years, doctors' pay has risen below inflation so we've taken a pay cut, not a pay rise.

Given senior civil servants pay only 1.5% for the same pension and this will rise to 3.5% or so. Compare this to 24%. How is this fair?

To me, this all smells of a rat - propose health bill, create CCGs so when it goes tits up the blame is on GPs, [LIFTED] about with doctors' pensions and make it look like they're greedy, vilify them and then dissolve the NHS for a "better" model that is comparable to a wreck of the current train system and the dentists system - ie if you want decent care, you had better be rich. If you're poor, don't get ill.

Civil servants are on a pay freeze, so we've had an effective pay cut too.

We might pay less in contributions (it's 7% or 8% by the way) but we don't get a pension worth £50,000+.

The civil service pension scheme is also in surplus.

My figures were based on senior civil servants and based on the literature from their website, they earn £50-100k - the same bracket as most senior doctors. These same civil servants then get a final salary scheme pension despite paying much less in terms of contributions.

Remember, like civil servants, NHS doctors get paid less than privately. I know of doctors who do solely private work and earn 3-4x what their counterparts in the NHS do.

You get a pension that's a proportion of your salary (either final salary or lifetime average salary, depends on the scheme). so a lower grade worker won't get £50K but someone who is say an area director in HMRC probably would.

As I say you can't really base the argument on comparisons between groups of people over this kind of thing - any group you choose is always kind of selective, and therefore there are obvious counterexamples just waiting to be provided. It gets us nowhere.

Personally I have no real problem with doctors getting a decent pension. It's a highly skilled job - as I say, five years training plus an amount of 'apprenticeship' stuff after that - plus it's also a very stressful job - I've had five GPs in my lifetime, and four of them have died before they got to the age when they could have started drawing a pension, so in fact the state did very well out of their contributions. I'd be interested to see the statistics about what age doctors tend to pop off rather than the population as a whole. The question is priorities, what do we as a nation want tp spend our money on.? Pensions for doctors or new roads? New schools or drugs for cancer sufferers? Child benefit or Eurofighters? There's never enough money in the pot for everything, so the question is actually - what do you want to pay for most? Frankly, this lot don't seem to want to pay for anything, but they're happy to take more from us every budget. I'd much rather pay doctor's pensions than refit Trident for example.


Pretty much all the public sector pension schemes are in surplus. The whole mantra that 'we can't afford it' is, to put it bluntly, propagandist bollocks by The Nasty Party. The schemes will stay in surplus provided the government and the staff in them both make the contributions required by current agreements. The staff are willing to, the government isn't. But it won't actually say that because then it (rightly) looks like they're welching on the deal they signed up for when they took office. So they say they can't pay, when in fact the truth is they won't pay.

^^^^Nail. Head.


There's absolutely no reason for this other than to generate more tax. Personally I think if this goes ahead, all doctors should pull out of the pension scheme.

As for the strike itself, patients are likely to do better. This is because the lack of junior doctors working means that the consultants had to cover so patients actually received better care.

While both the Civil Service and NHS pension scheme may well be in surplus at the moment there is a demographic bulge (from the baby boomers) that are nearing retirement so that surplus will soon vanish. You therefore need to build that up – the problem is that both of the pension scheme do not invest the money they just pay it into the treasury and the treasury pays out pension so in a few years it will be running at a large loss

What (Any of them) governments should have don 30 odd yrs ago was use the pension contributions to build up a very large pension fund, invested in all the normal things pension funds invest in so that the pension burden would not fall on future generations but that would have required planning and giving up some jam today to more jam tomorrow

Not according to the National Audit Office. According to them, the schemes have enough surplus and will have enough money incoming from still working members to meet their obligations for the forseeable future. For every person currently in the scheme, they know exactly when they will have to start paying their pension and they can make a projection of how much that pension will be and how long they will have to pay it for. Those projections are obviously guesses but there is a certain 'wisdom of crowds' aspect to their guesses i.e. for everyone in the scheme who lives to be 100 there will be someone who dies before they reach retirement age and so on. The future might change in terms of salaries but they have long term data in how those have varied in the past and will have made projections for the future. Guesses again, but educated guesses. Certainly just as good guesses as anyone inside the treasury or Conservative head office.

The NAO is an independent body that has no axe to grind and they say the funds will be self-financing for as long as they're willing to trust their predictions. The government, which has an agenda to expose the public sector to 'private competition' and therefore has to get rid of all the pension liabilities it can to make the public sector attractive to private providers, says they won't. Now, which of those two do you think is more objective?

+1. The NHS pensions scheme will go for ages. There's also a theory amongst some doctors that the Govt's plan is to sell off the NHS to the private sector. Emergencies will be attended to by the remains of the NHS and anything profitable will be taken by the private sector. This means if you're fit and healthy and break your leg, the private company will do it and charge £££ (who gets charged remains to be seen but essentially the public will have to pay in some way or another). If you've got asthma, your blood pressure's high despite doing everything right, you have an irregular heart rhythm, you've developed familial hypercholesteraemia and you're blind in one eye, the private company won't touch you because things are more likely to go wrong and that's bad for the company's figures. Instead, you'll be "dumped" on to the NHS.


Remember, at the moment it costs £60/yr/person for unlimited appointments with your GP. There are some who need to see their GP every 2-3 weeks and some who can go for years without being seen. If it all goes private, there's no way you're gonna get anyone to see you for £60.