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

paper only to indicate ideas, and not necessarily to follow them to conclusions ; he had

left that for the speakers in the discussion. He did not propose to deal at great length with
all the points which had arisen, many of which were important but somewhat incidental

to the main question of standardizing or combining schemes. He fully agreed that
unification of finance was not desirable. There were arguments for it, but in his opinion,

as in the opinion of most of those present, they were weak arguments.

There were far stronger and more cogent reasons for separate finance, but he did not

regard those reasons as in any way detracting from the idea of standard benefits.
One or two speakers had said that they did not think that transfers were very frequent.

Again he could only speak for his own authority. He hesitated to quote a figure, but he

would put the number of transfer values, incoming and outgoing, with which they had
dealt annually, at between 5 and 10 per cent, of the membership of their fund.

Although The Development of Public Superannuation Schemes 37 that figure included

transfers of nurses, who would, to a large extent, cease, the total was certainly not
inconsiderable. Probably also they saw more of the special cases of transfer values than

did most other authorities, and knew the difficulties of the person who said that he had

lost something by his transfer from another scheme.

That kind of thing should not be allowed. He knew that in many cases people transferred
voluntarily, but they should not have artificial penalties put on them for what was

presumably an increase in the efficiency of the public service—because otherwise they
would not be taken into the employment of their new employer.

That kind of discrepancy could be avoided by uniform benefits. Reference had been made
to the way in which those pension schemes had developed, and to the reasons behind

their provisions. The reasons for creating a particular benefit at a certain time might have

been very good ones even if the need for some of the provisions had since largely
disappeared. For instance, the reasons for the lump sum benefit were very good when it

was first introduced, for at that time no special provision was made for widows. He