Leavers weepers
I AM prompted to wonder how many peo- ple who joined ICI at the beginning of their working lives are now retiring on full pen- sion. ICI is a good provider and they must have imagined, all those years ago, that it would always be there for them. So it is, but that will not help them if they have moved on, or have been moved out. Full pensions in a final-salary scheme depend on staying put. They also depend on the employer staying put, and companies get bought or sold or go drifting out of business, and when they are gone who will pay or bother to administer their pension schemes? Now at long last the Office of Fair Trading has turned its attention to company pensions. It is startled to find that 19 people out of 20 do not stay with one employer and that moving can cost them a third of their pen- sions. A closer inspection would show the OFT that these schemes work by cross-sub- sidy and that leavers pay for stayers, young for old, women for men and serfs for direc- tors. They are at best a legacy of an age of vast employers (the National Coal Board had 750,000 people on its pay roll) and of jobs that seemed to be for life. Life itself is not like that.
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