Page 67 - Group Insurance and Retirement Benefit IC 83 E- Book

doing rough justice would it be possible to succeed in bringing about any form of

simplification at all. He then touched on the question whether pension schemes in the
public service should be contributory or non-contributory. Leaving out of account for the

moment the question of funding or not funding, or of having only one fund, he wished to
direct attention to the administrative benefits of a non-contributory scheme. He was well

aware that the Chorley Committee on Civil Service pay recently recommended that the
Civil Service scheme should be made contributory, but the only argument advanced in

favour of that was that it would bring it into line with the local government scheme; in

other words, transfer from the Civil Service to local government would be more simply
and easily effected if both schemes were on the same basis. Personally, he felt that the

proper thing was to go the other way and have non-contributory schemes for local

government. He did not mean that there should be no funding; he believed that it was
perfectly possible to have a non-contributory scheme with a fund, and he believed that it

was even possible to refund contributions which had never been made. He thought that
there were merits in doing even that. The greatest disadvantage of a non-contributory

scheme was that a man leaving local government or the Civil Service and going into
industry could not take his contributions away with him, but it should be quite possible to

devise a scheme under which contributions he had made not directly, but by a diminution

in his rate of pay, could be recognized, and a refund made.
Mr A. J. D. Winnifrith (a visitor) was definitely against standardization, his first reason

being a practical one. To unify the numerous systems which prevailed, it would be
necessary to negotiate with all the interests concerned and that process of negotiation

would be lengthy and expensive. It would be expensive because, as a previous speaker
had suggested, the process would be one of levelling up and not of leveling down. It

would be protracted, because all the different bodies would have to be brought into the

talks, and they would all have individual points of view. It was all very well to say that
the Government should use a strong arm and mete out rough justice, but a Bill would be

necessary to bring the new unified scheme into force and there was no constituent more

persistent in his attentions to Members of Parliament than the disgruntled pensioner.