Holy crap this dam country sucks so much

[link to www.dailymail.co.uk]

A council boss who quit after just seven years received a £297,000 lump sum and a guaranteed pension of nearly £100,000 a year.

The massive windfall would pay for 20 teachers in the first year alone, according to councillors.

Peter Gould was only 54 when he left his job as the £215,000 a year chief executive of Northamptonshire County Council.

The case is yet another example of the growing 'apartheid' between retirement packages in the public and private sector.

Experts calculated that a private sector worker would need a pension pot of at least £4.5million to match Mr Gould's £97,000 a year deal. To build that up over just seven years would have meant pumping in around £550,000 a year, beyond the means of anyone apart from the wealthiest.

Mr Gould's generous deal, which was this week drawn to the attention of Gordon Brown in the Commons, comes after it was revealed that a quarter of all council tax is now spent funding town hall pensions.

Last night Tory MP Brian Binley, who raised the matter at Prime Minister's questions, called for public sector pension arrangements to be reviewed.

'It is not sustainable and at a time when those in the private sector face pension cuts it is not fair either.

'Changes must start at the top, where the pension arrangements are the most generous.

'We have had a former chief executive of our council leave that office at a relatively young age with a lump sum payment and a £97,000 a year index-linked pension.

'That is complete nonsense and exemplifies the bloated nature of costs in our public services at present.'

Under Labour, the cost of local government pensions to the taxpayer has risen from £1.3billion to £5billion. Families paying an average council tax bill of £1,154 now stump up £285 to subsidise them, and attempts to restrict the early retirement privileges of town hall staff have been shelved.

Nearly 2.5million workers will see their final salary pensions cut in the recession, industry chiefs say.

Referring to the case of Mr Gould, former Treasury pensions adviser Ros Altmann said: 'This is another vivid demonstration of how out of touch public sector pensions are with reality.

'It is also a classic illustration of how the public sector itself does not seem to realise how expensive those pension deals truly are.' Mr Gould took early retirement in May 2007 after a scheme he backed to change the way the council is run was rejected by councillors.

He said that the lack of support made it impossible for him to continue working with the authority. Before he stepped down, he topped the town hall 'rich list' of the country's highest-paid council officials.

His retirement package was agreed under a legitimate contractual agreement.

A spokesman for Northamptonshire County Council said: 'Peter Gould took early retirement which entitled him to early access to his pension arrangements in accordance with the council's policies and procedures at that time.

'Since this time, the county council has carried out a full review of these policies which have been altered as a result.'