Page 78 - Group Insurance and Retirement Benefit IC 83 E- Book

would suppose for a moment, however, that it was a problem. The simplest task was the

calculation of the transfer value itself; the difficult task was agreeing the salary, the
contributory service, the non-contributory service and the contributions paid with the

other authority. If each local authority was to keep any records at all after unification, this
task would remain, except that the amount of correspondence would be doubled by

passing through a central office. Much had already been said on the subject of funding,
but he felt that at a meeting of the Institute it could not be said too often. The system of

un funding completely obscured the true cost of a pension scheme, a cost which should

be provided, as the opener so rightly said, when the members were in active service and
were still a producing asset.

It would be unsound, in his view, to advise any company, however large and prosperous,

to establish an unfunded scheme, and he saw no reason why an exception should be made
in the case of a nationalized industry or the centralized fund of a service. He would

welcome the continuation of the traditional actuarial method of funding.
Mr J. H. Gunlake, in closing the discussion, said that there had been a very long and full

debate, and he did not think that there remained much for him to do except to underline
one or two of the more important points.

While agreeing with almost everything that Mr Marples had said, he disagreed with him

slightly on one point, namely, his comment on the arrangement of the paper. The paper
fell naturally into two parts—first, an historical survey, very brief but extremely useful,

which the author properly relegated to the appendices, and secondly, an equally brief and
very tersely argued survey of certain possible future developments. The appendices were

arranged in a particular way, and it was of some interest to re-arrange the information in
chronological order and pick out a few of the milestones in this progress through history,

because it revealed some of the salient problems as they had become apparent—problems

which, of course, still existed and were still encountered in dealing with pension schemes.
How, then, did it all begin? He knew of at least one very early case of the problem of a

pension in the public service, and that was the problem that faced Samuel Pepys in 1660,

when he took over the job of Clerk of the Acts of the Navy Board and had to deal with
his predecessor. Having successfully fought him off (because he showed some signs of

trying to take on the job again) Pepys allowed him a pension out of his own salary, and it