Labour will introduce new rules to revoke public servants’ pensions if it cannot stop Wayne Couzens from receiving a £7,000-a-year payout, The Telegraph can reveal.
Government lawyers are currently locked in a legal battle to prevent Couzens, the killer of Sarah Everard, from claiming his pension from the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC).
However, two years into the dispute, no ruling has been handed down and Couzens, 53, could receive his first payment as early as next year.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) said it was “absolutely determined” to stop the payout and confirmed it would introduce legislation if the court challenge failed.
Officials declined to rule out whether the new powers would apply to all public servants, raising the prospect of wider pension forfeitures.
Hard cases make bad law etc. Your pension is deferred pay. If they can’t come after you for what they’ve paid you before your conviction then why should they be able to come after your pension?
Yes, yes, I too an excited by the idea of stripping all the lanyard class of all their pensions. But – perhaps precisely because I am excited by it – I think it ends up being a bad idea. It’s not impossible to imagine it developing into the idea that people should be stripped for opposing the rainbow flag or summat.
We know one group that will never, ever be made to forfeit their pensions, the politicians and their snivil service. No matter what the pols/snivils do they won’t be punished because Ministers never do anything apart from talk and need the snivils to make it look as though something is being done. Mind you, the Chief Plod who obeyed his Muslim masters and lled to Parliament to ban the Jews was allowed to sail off into the sunset quietly with his full pension…
Surely it is his wife and children who will get the benefit of it, and why shouldn’t they?
Are you arguing that special provisions should be made for dependents in bankruptcies?
No.
Quite so! Yet perhaps a clause could be written – even retrospectively, with due notice? – into all contractual agreements involving public sector pension rights that the pension is void if the holder is convicted of a serious criminal offence…
Who decides what is a serious criminal offense? MiniTrue and the Thought Police?
Serious criminal offences in the UK (indictable offences) are those automatically tried in Crown Court by a judge and jury. Duh!
It would certainly incentivise a move to defined contributions in the public sector ! DB pensions do create this possibility. Its possible to do it to a significant to degree for police roles and armed forces – maybe security services though not sure. Limited to the employers contribution value (a stonking 65% ) for severe crimes (10yearplus tariff) , treason and official secrets act breaches and , slightly more worryingly, if you really upset the relevant SofS.
Ideally i’d balance it in other ways – it’s way too hard to deal with underperforming civil servants (and frankly for a quiet life lots of promoting them to someone else happens) . Otoh if we apply this to armed forces and police forces as they have such a key public confidence role it should equally apply to members of both Houses and those with honours in an equivalent way – some of the powers are their for MPs are their but they are even more rarely used.
So yeah – not keen, maybe don’t do pensions that way and if you do do it , do it on a level paying field,
That’s a good reason for doing it.
Mmm… Surely it’s rather different with the public sector. Question being, is there a pension fund or are existing pensions being paid on the Ponzi principal? Point being the pension wouldn’t be deferred earnings, just earnings not paid to the recipient. So one could argue that they knew the scheme they were getting into depended on obligations to fund pension payments. And that behaviour could effect those obligations. By that logic we can safely defund the lanyard classes with clear consciouses.
It’s rather like the State Retirement Pension. There is no fund & pension payments are at the whim of politicians. So different politicians, different whims. Tough but fair. They’ve been quite happy with the system. Should have spotted the flaw.
Is a fair point and way of doing but not changing the law retrospectively to do it. It is basically done that way for police and armed forces.
I was more addressing Tim’s point about the lanyard classes rather than the particular Couzens case. As far as the State Retirement Pension’s concerned, retrospective legislation’s the norm. They’ve retrospectively changed the retirement ages. As I said, depends whether pensions are funded. If they’re funded, there’s actually money there, is pension holders’ & should be sacrosanct. If non-funded, it’s a Ponzi & they knew it was when they accepted the terms. Why should they be protected from their own actions? No one else is.
“They’ve retrospectively changed the retirement ages.”
No they haven’t. No one has retired, then been told ‘Sorry, your pension is cancelled and you won’t get it again for another year or two’. The change in the retirement age ‘in the future’ is no different to a change in the tax rate ‘in the future’. Neither are retrospective.
\the WASPI women seem to disagree…
Nope. They were warned (or rather, the change was announced) decades before they actually retired. They’re simply whining because, occasionally, “equality” works both ways and they end up not being the favoured party.
When equality laws demanded the equalisation of male and female retirement ages, the male age was never going to be lowered to match the wimmin’s, was it? Way too costly, and anyway men are undeserving bastards.
The reasonable middle ground would be to convert the pension from DB to DC, and change public sector employment contracts to state that that will happen if the employee is dismissed for misconduct.
Surely the logical thing is not to stop the pension but to use it to fund damages for the family of his victim? I don’t know how often victims take civil legal action to sue murderers etc in such cases.
I think my idea was to liquidate the pensions and pay them in cash sums, removing the link with inflation but it comes
With a variety of other legislation. Socialist taxes following the removal
Of the secret ballot and severe restrictions on left wingers being employed in the public sector, as well as plural votes for the wealthy and those in the private sector.
But I agree Tim – a good illustration of hard cases making bad law!!
You hear this talk a lot when it comes to civil servants in court for serious offences, but the simple fact remains that it is a deferred payment, something already earned and belonging to the employee.
Start removing pensions from them, and where will it end? Of course as others have pointed out, he does have a family, and they too would be punished for his behaviour.
It’s not a hard case at all. Its an easy one. What were the rules regarding his employment, to the letter? Do they mean he should get a pension? Right, pay him the pension then.
If you want to look at the situation and say it was wrong, then coldly, write a modification to the rules from this day forward. Think carefully about what the rules are. If we can stop a murderer receiving his pension, can we also take money from a murderer if they opted out and put it into a SIPP or cashed it in and bought a place in Spain, and if not, why not? What level of criminality do we apply? Murdering women? Rape? Car theft? Littering?
The problem once you get into retrospective changes to the law is, what else do you want to apply that to? Blokes who took photos of 16 year old page 3 girls back in the 80s? Do we seize their wealth or lock them up for what is now counted as CP?
This is purely a short term reaction to public disgust and the right answer is to explain that sorry, those were the rules. We’re going to spend far more money changing this law than just paying Couzens £7k a year. And it’ll probably be half-baked because it’s rushed.
But then, I’m a “limit of the state” sort of person who believes that everything else puts you on a road to arbitrary prosecutions and fascism.
Did he do the work that generated the pension? If the answer’s ’Yes’ then it’s due to him, no matter what he did subsequently
There’s one bit of pension legislation I’m sure we’d al, be in favour of repealing. The Sir Kier Starmer Pension Act. Can I take the vote as being unanimous?.No parliament can bind its successor, isn’t it?
Let’s just impose an extra 20% income tax on all “public sector” pensions.
It was up to the judge to impose a fine in addition to the prison sentence if he/she (the judge) decided it was appropriate.
Of course, hanging Mr Couzens would have saved any debate about his pension.
Seven thousand quid a year isn’t a lot. It’s certainly not worth spending a hundred times that on fighting it in court. Next thing they’ll be revoking pensions for questioning climate change.
I served for 22 years in the previous incarnation of the CNC. It was made quite clear to me when I joined that there was no fund as such to pay a pension but that pension payments would be coming out of the money allocated by the government of the day to run the Authority..I believe that is still the case for the current CNC.Any money deducted from Couzens salary whilst in the CNC would therefore be deferred payment and belong to him
By contrast I have a small pension from before I joined the CNC and those contributions were paid into a special pension fund which publishes regular balance sheets with details of how much is in the fund and how it is invested
But there wasn’t any money deducted was there? If it was, where is it? It was just money that wasn’t paid.
pension payments would be coming out of the money allocated by the government of the day to run the Authority.
So at the whim of government
One can’t be blamed for feeling vindictive. Civil Servants long stopped being Civil servants & became Civil Masters. They have no enthusiasm for deporting illegal immigrants like the police have no enthusiasm for pursuing criminals. But a great deal of enthusiasm for celebrating Diversity.
But that’s true of all public sector pay. “Money deducted” is simply not paid to them. Public sector “tax” is a fiction.
And then, pension pots, for those few cases in which the money deducted actually goes into a scheme rather than simply being withheld and replaced by a polly’s promise. An economy is goods & services, and even now this almost always comes down to a human somewhere willing to expend time & energy in return for something. All the money in the world won’t do you any good if, when you need it above all else, no-one is prepared to wipe your arse. My Kingdom For A Horse, etc.
An economy is goods & services, and even now this almost always comes down to a human somewhere willing to expend time & energy in return for something.
This is the way think of it. The actual money circulating in an economy must be a reflection of the quantity of goods & services being produced/consumed in the present. There isn’t anything else in an economy. All other money is book-keeping entries about future, possible money. Like stock market prices. The only real money in a stock market is the current dividends. The price is a presumed entitlement to future company earnings. It’s not today money. It doesn’t yet exist
One could even say there is nothing in an economy but services. Since for any good, from raw material to finished product consumed, the entire is added value by somebody.
Did Couzens commit any offences whilst in the CNC? If not, if the CNC pension is kept from him, then Shirley, the deductions from his salary towards this pension, should be returned to him, otherwise it’s theft, not that that would bother this government, I feel.