Page 81 - Group Insurance and Retirement Benefit IC 83 E- Book

in the paper. On the question of uniformity, variations were always disliked by planners

and administrators and legislators, because they made work.
Perhaps no department of Government might have been better excused for objecting to

variations than the Treasury, yet Mr Winnifrith had said that he was an individualist, and
opposed to uniformity. There was no doubt that Mr Winnifrith was right. Human beings

were untidy, and human development was untidy; that was what made life interesting. He
thought it also made it efficient. Those variations were not haphazard, or the product of

obstinate minds ; they had arisen for definite reasons, and before they were swept away it

was necessary to be very careful indeed to see that the reasons which gave rise to them
were no longer valid. The next point was economy of administration, and on that subject

he had been delighted to hear, though somewhat late in the discussion, some very

trenchant remarks. Centralization and uniformity, to his mind, would inevitably lead to
duplication of records and duplication of function, because head office would never allow

the branches to administer without checks, and the branches would never be satisfied to
leave it to head office without checks. Then came the question of unified valuation. That

was the second stage in the rake's progress; the first stage was uniformity of benefits,
then all the liabilities were amalgamated, and the third step was 3-2.

36 The Development of Public Superannuation Schemes to dissipate all the assets. He
did not know how it would be possible to amalgamate the liabilities while continuing to

place the pension liability on the proper shoulders. Local authorities should meet the
liabilities arising out of the service of their employees with them, and there was no way

of seeing that they did that except by valuing the separate liabilities, as Mr Scholey had
pointed out. Reference had been made to fluidity of staff, and that was a matter that might

be left to the local government authorities. Clearly there was something to be said, in the

national interest, for promoting the movement of staff from over-manned to under-
manned industries, but whether it was equally right to promote what some unkind people

might call a movement of staff from one overmanned public authority to another over-

manned public authority was another matter.
The dissipation of assets was a question about which it was impossible to speak too

seriously, and he was glad that so many speakers had taken that line.