Page 72 - Group Insurance and Retirement Benefit IC 83 E- Book

liable to fall between them and lose rights which he ought to have. A certain amount of

uniformity would be quite easy to achieve, with a little guidance. The three main schemes
were already running on fairly similar lines—the scheme for teachers, the Health Service

scheme and the Civil Service scheme. Discussions were proceeding for getting widows'
pensions written into the scheme for teachers, and he thought that they could easily be

introduced in the same way as they were in the Health Service or the Civil Service. It was
unfortunate that there were different terms for widows in those two cases, but there was

something close to uniformity there, and the sort of arrangement was much the same. One

of the difficulties in obtaining uniformity was partly historical. All the schemes had just
grown up, like Topsy, and everybody had his own opinion about their provisions.

The Development of Public Superannuation Schemes 31

Personally, he thought that the lump sum had some advantages, in spite of what Mr

Marples had said. There was evidence that people liked to have a small lump sum when
they retired, which enabled them to change their mode of living, and it was useful when a

man died for his widow to have not only a pension but also a lump sum. If some
uniformity were to be achieved, he thought that the technicians would have to throw

overboard some of their finer principles; it would not be possible to follow the tendency,

in interchange rules, etc., to tie everything up to the last detail. He was not an expert on
the question whether pension schemes should be funded. As an individual, he inclined to

the view that there ought to be a fund as a way of trying to provide in the present for the
liabilities of the future ; but nobody had referred to the biggest scheme of all, the National

Insurance Scheme, and nobody had suggested that an enormous fund should be run for
that. He thought the answer might be that a public service scheme had to be set against

the credit of the employer, and if that credit was very good, as was the case where the

employer was the nation or a local authority, there was no point in incurring all the
expense and trouble of keeping a large fund going and of valuing it. But, even if there

were no fund, he thought that contributions from the individual represented a principle

which should be maintained; because it preserved the individual's feeling that he
participated in the scheme and that it meant something to him.