Page 66 - Group Insurance and Retirement Benefit IC 83 E- Book

most important things were the increase in longevity, the fall in the rate of interest

(which, however, seemed to have been checked), and the increase in scales of salary.
Those three things were the major causes of the large deficiencies which caused the local

government officer and the finance committee so much concern. He felt sure that
actuaries, when they made their quinquennial reports, would bring home to the members

of the authorities the causes of those big deficiencies, which were not understood in local
government. It would take a long time to make them properly understood.

He spoke, of course, as one who advised a local authority and not as one who hoped to

get some benefits from the pension scheme, but to his mind the defect in the local
government schemes was that the deficiencies were inevitably met by the employer, and

not shared by the employer and employee. There were no provisions for varying the rate

of contribution for existing members, however much the circumstances might have
changed, and hence the position arose that an officer might get a substantial increase in

his remuneration towards the end of his career which would ultimately cause a very
severe deficiency in the fund, and that substantial deficiency was, of course, met entirely

by the employer and not by the employee. The people who negotiated the 1932 Act, and
subsequently the 1937 Act, may have intended that the cost of pensions should be borne

equally between employer and employee, but that position had been lost, and the

employer was now bearing, and would in future bear, a much larger proportion of the
cost of the pension. He thought that that sort of thing ought to be brought home to the

employer.
The other important matter, which had already been touched on both by the author and by

other speakers, was the growing complexity of superannuation in local government, and
indeed in the public service generally. The regulations issued under the National Health

Service scheme covered 88 pages, and he believed that ten pages of amendments had

already been issued since the regulations were published in July, 1948. 28 The
Development of Public Superannuation Schemes Much more could be said about the

complexities of superannuation schemes in the public service. The reason was, he

thought, the insistence in every conceivable case on absolute fairness to the individual.
So long as this was insisted upon, it would be necessary to go on making superannuation

legislation more and more complicated. Only if there was a readiness to be content with