TRADES UNION leaders and British ministers last night disagreed about the number of civil servants who went on strike yesterday in England, Scotland and Wales in protests at proposals to cut their pensions.
The propaganda war over the numbers is significant since yesterday’s protest, which was capped by a march past the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, could be a forerunner of more serious industrial action in the autumn.
The most militant of the unions, the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), which represents many low-paid workers, insisted more than 250,000 of their members had gone on strike, but the Cabinet Office claimed the number barely exceeded 100,000.
Nine in every 10 staff PCS members in the Department of Work and Pensions walked out, with 85 per cent of the union’s numbers in HM Revenue and Customs doing the same, while just five people went to work at Liverpool Crown Court, forcing the cancellation of two high-profile trials.
However, there is no doubt the one-day strike paralysed schools, with the Department of Education conceding 5,679 local authority schools had been closed, while 4,999 more were partially closed.
Just 5,860 were fully open, 200 academies and City Technology Colleges – schools that have been taken out of local authority control – were closed because National Union of Teachers and Association of Teachers and Lecturers staff stayed away.
The government has sought to justify its demand to force public workers to pay 3 per cent more for pensions from next year and to face retirement at 66 – rather than 60 today for a minority of them – from 2020. Pension rules for state workers were changed a few years ago to mean that most must work until 65 before retiring, while recently employed civil servants will get a pension based on their average career earnings, rather than the more generous final salary pension held by older ones.
Ministers were put on the defensive after it was highlighted that a key pensions report written by a former Labour minister said the share from the UK’s gross domestic product spent on public pensions will drop by half over the next 50 years. However, the future reduction is based on chancellor George Osborne’s decision to limit future pension rises to the consumer prices index rather than the lower retail prices index, along with a belief the state will dramatically curb the number of workers it hires in coming decades.
Pension costs for state workers, excluding the state pension paid to everyone, have risen by a third in real terms over the last decade to nearly £32 billion in 2008-09, while employee contributions have fallen. At a Westminster rally, Association of Teachers and Lecturers’ leader Mary Bousted wasapplauded by 2,000 protesters when she said Labour leader Ed Miliband was “a disgrace” for failing to support the strike.
“He should be ashamed of himself. If our strike is a mistake, what has he done to oppose this devastating attack on our pensions? If the opposition will not defend our pensions, we will,” she said.
In a letter given to education secretary Michael Gove, teachers said their action was “not based solely on self-interest. We believe that government proposals will have a very serious and long lasting impact upon the recruitment and retention of the profession.”
One Irish union member, Cork-born lecturer Ilan Rua Wall, who was on strike from his post at Oxford Brookes University, said: “I left Ireland five or six years ago. Now I find that the best and the brightest in teaching in the UK are leaving for Australia because the pay is better, the pensions are better, the conditions are better – all because the government here is trying to rip the heart out of the system.”
