Paymaster calls the wrong pension tune

IT WAS once said of Sir Keith Joseph that he not only had the capacity to shoot himself in the foot but, worse still, he could hit his left foot while aiming for his right one. The ghost of Sir Keith evidently stalks the corridors of the Department for Education and Employment. For on the eve of an election the department has done the seemingly impossible. It has at a stroke managed to unite the employers and the unions in opposition to its proposed reform of premature and ill-health retirement arrangements.

In what passes for consultation these days - the publication of a draft statutory instrument and a short period of time to comment on it before implementation - the Government promises to wreak havoc with the only real facility colleges have to cope with chronic underfunding. That facility is to target the over-50s for redundancy in the knowledge that they can, at least, get their pension early as their careers are brought to an end.

The Government proposes that from next April employers should pay for the extra cost of the early withdrawal of pension. This cost is estimated to be as much as three times the person's salary. It is hard to invent a scheme that will force employers to make younger rather than older people redundant - but this is surely it.

The same regulations promise to tighten up ill-health retirement procedures. General practitioners are no longer to be trusted to judge if a lecturer should retire early on health grounds but are trusted to pledge that he or she will be permanently unfit to teach. The joint effect is that not only the relatively old but those who are ill but not permanently incapacitated will be kept to their posts and the young and presumably fit will go.

It is true that recent years have seen an unseemly scrabble to get early access to pension. Some will blame the Government's education policies and underfunding for that. Whatever the cause, given the pay-as-you-go character of the funding of pensions, we have all suspected that easy early retirement is a bubble which would burst.

But what we have a right to expect is that when change occurs it is planned, sufficient notice is given and alternatives are put in place if we are still to manage - as we have to - staff reductions. These proposals are draconian because they are sudden and smack of panic about the funding of the pension scheme. Most of all they remind governors who may have thought that because as the employer they pay contributions and as employees the lecturers pay, pension decisions should be left to them.

After all pensions are just deferred remuneration. So much for incorporation when the Government whimsically decides that it is, after all, the paymaster and can call the tune.

Keith Scribbins is chair of governors of City of Bristol College.