Page 79 - Group Insurance and Retirement Benefit IC 83 E- Book

was an amusing footnote to something which the opener had said that the proportion

which he allowed him was almost exactly 30%. It might be added that Pepys dealt with
his own pension problem out of his own savings.

The first of the historical cases mentioned in the paper was the 1829 Metropolitan Police
Act, and it was worth while reading again the words in Appendix II of the paper; the Act

provided ' for discretionary allowances to such policemen " as shall be disabled by bodily
injury received, or shall be worn out by length of service " '. There was the enunciation of

the principle that a pension should only be granted in case of need. Some of the

difficulties that had arisen in the last hundred odd years might be the result of straying a
little too far from the fundamental conception.

The main event in the history of the matter, however, was the first Civil Service Act, the

Superannuation Act of 1834. That scheme had a number of special features. In the first
place, following up the thought that arose in the case of the police, it seemed to have been

assumed that, so far as civil servants were concerned, they could be regarded as being
worn out by length of service on reaching the age of 65. That might have been a

reasonable assumption at the time. It was fair to add that, physiologically, the age of 65 in
1834 might have been equivalent to 70 or even 75 to-days. The next great feature of that

Civil Service scheme was that it was non-contributory and not funded. He did not know

anything of the circumstances in which the matter was argued at the time, but he thought
that it was quite probable that those points were not very much discussed. The Civil

Service, as had already been said, was then very small. It was not recruited by The
Development of Public Superannuation Schemes 35 examination, but by what might be

called ' appointment ', and pensions were probably granted for obvious reasons.
Incidentally, the pensions for the pre-1829 entrants were at the rate of 100 % of final pay.

The next Civil Service Act, the Act of 1859, took the pension-age question a little further,

the idea being, apparently, that if the Government might fairly assume that a civil servant
was worn out at 65, the civil servant himself might consider that he was worn out at 60,

and so he was given an optional right to retire at that age. That process had been reversed

recently by the belated but necessary recognition of the fact that people now lived so
much longer, and remained fit so much longer, that everything possible should be done to

encourage them not to retire until the last possible moment. The next piece of legislation