My recent visit to the Royal Pavilion gardens reminded me of my previous visit many years ago. On that occasion I had intended to visit the Pavilion but there was a long queue so I opted for a quiet lunch in the gardens. I chose the perfect bench but what followed was anything but quiet and relaxing. On my recent visit I sought out the bench only to find it is no more.

What follows is the tale from my previous visit in 2010:

On the half day that I had free between the two conferences I decided to visit the Royal Pavilion. To save time I asked for directions at the hotel reception and found my way there quite easily although it was further than I thought. The pavilion looked rather packed so I decided just to enjoy the garden which was free. It was lunch time so before looking round the garden I nipped to the nearest baker and bought a blueberry muffin, which looked a lot more appetising than the rather gooey looking sandwiches. I then made my way back to the garden and sat on a bench to eat it The bag the muffin had been in made a bid for freedom and whilst I was trying to rescue it a small piece of blueberry muffin dropped on the floor next to my feet.

A few minutes later I was assailed by a rather large seagull who was weighing up the options of doing a duck and dive at the crumb. I had visions of my feet being skewered by his beak and he refused to be shooed away! Then I saw a squirrel running towards me, but luckily he had something else on his mind and he carried on past me without stopping. Eventually I moved to the other end of the bench so I could finish eating in peace. And yes the seagull did then dive for the crumb.

Just as I was finishing eating a youth with a beer can plonked himself next to me on the bench. Thankfully he was dragged away by his friends who told him ‘don’t annoy the lady’. There was a bit of back chat but he followed them anyway. Just when I thought I was going to get some peace and quiet at long last, I was approached by a Jehovah’s Witness…

Gardens in Brighton are not at all what I am used to!

It was more relaxing along the seafront (despite the traffic) when I took my sunset photos later in the day.

more ‘My Work’ can be found in the gallery.

The fact that the Public and Commercial Services trade union had called a strike on Wednesday gave me the excuse to take an extra day off and accompany Mr C to Newcastle where he was delivering a training course on Thursday.  I have fond memories of business trips to Newcastle a number of years ago and I was long overdue another visit.  Those of you who read me regularly will know that Northumberland is one of my favourite parts of the world.

I got my bits and pieces ready in the morning and set off for the north just after lunch.  By the time we reached Leeming Bar it was time for a refreshing cup of tea at a motorway service station.  It was distinctly chilly when I stepped out of the car, but on setting foot inside the service station I realised that it was even more chilly inside!!  Then I sat on the wooden chair…  Needless to say I didn’t take my coat off and I drank my tea quickly before it went cold.

Once in Newcastle we drove a couple of circuits trying to spot the hotel and then as every good photographer knows to do I looked up.  I could just see the neon  sign of the Hotel Vermont peeping out from behind another wall and luckily there was one last space on the car park.  As I entered the hotel I noticed a Ferrari and a Rolls Royce flanking either side of the entrance door.

The hotel reception is currently being refurbished and a temporary reception was set up at one end of the dining room.  Booking in was a little cramped. The reservation had been for up to two people but they never did ask who the second person was and there was none of the usual signing a registration document…

There was just enough time to unpack before going down to dinner.  The weather was a little bit iffy so we stayed in the hotel for a meal.  For some reason we got free veg and free drinks at the end of the meal although we did have to retreat to the other side of the dining room for the drinks, it had dropped decidedly chilly outside and there was an avalanche of cold air coming off the windows!

As you can see from the photo I dropped lucky and got a ‘room with a view‘ again

On Thursday 14th February Philip Dunne, Minister for Defence Equipment, Support and Technology visited my workplace, the Defence Support Group (DSG), to hand out campaign medals to workers who have served in Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, in recognition of the pivotal support they provided to the front line troops.

Ironically Philip Dunne is the Minister that is currently responsible for approving the potential sale of DSG. The sale was announced in October 2010 as part of the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR). If  it goes ahead it could mean that the people he was presenting medals to will be made redundant in the near future.

Members of staff joined together during their lunch break for an impromptu demonstration on the road outside their workplace. Their message was that selling off DSG to the private sector is the wrong decision. They hope their message would be heard and understood by the Minister for Defence Equipment, Support and Technology. Other workers driving past the demonstration on their way to and from work, showed their support by tooting their horns and waving.

• More detail on the event can be found here.
• More detail on the campaign can be found here.

On Saturday evening a good friend came round to visit.  There was lots of chatting, board games and a demonstration of Japanese medical skills and the next thing I knew it was 4.30 in the morning!!

The result of this late night/early morning meant I was rather lethargic during Sunday morning.  But I was forced to spring into action in the afternoon to clear away all the Christmas decorations. Following that there was the obligatory appearance of the vacuum cleaner to clear up all the little bits of decorations that linger on the carpet.  After all this activity I was able to log onto my computer for a few minutes before getting ready for my Sunday evening meal.

When I got up from the computer and left the room there was a heavy clunk as if something had fallen over.  When I went to investigate I couldn’t see that anything had moved and decided that it was the chair spinning round and hitting the desk.  I promptly forgot about it, until this morning…

When I opened the door to that room (the room I am in now) there was a little bit of resistance and it wouldn’t open fully.  When I managed to  open the door  and look behind it to investigate the problem I immediately noticed the word God glowing out from the dark and I could see a faint book outline underneath.  I bent down to pick the book up and realised that there were also two CDs on the floor as well.

I discovered the word God was on a bookmark. It is one I picked up a few years ago from St Mary’s Parish Church in Whitby whilst investigating my family history.  On one side of the bookmark there is a picture of the Church and on the other side the following quote:

God

Grant me

the Serenity

to accept the things

I cannot change,

Courage

to change

the things I can

and Wisdom

to know

the difference.

The other three things were also interesting…

The book was ‘Christy Moore, One Voice, My Life in Song’ – When I was campaigning against the moving of our work down south and the subsequent loss of skills, I used some of his songs in the campaign videos that I made.

One of the CDs contained photos taken by a colleague at a PCS conference a few years ago. Some of the photos on the disc were of an event where one of my campaign videos was shown – Tomorrow the first meeting takes place do discuss how we can raise awareness and campaign against the same issues.

The second CD had a few photographs that my Dad took of the flowers that I bought for my Mum’s 75th Birthday. She is 80 this year.

A message?…

The lack of proper negotiation led to the action that was taken by public sector workers today.

I found it quite infuriating to hear less than honest words spoken in the House today.

Below is an email sent from an MP to a PCS member last week.  Highlighted in red are some key points:

Thank you for your email about the strikes next week. I have to be in Westminster next Wednesday, however my position is clear and this is what I am saying to anyone who contacts me.

The government must bear much of the responsibility for what is happening now because it jumped the gun and has, in effect, imposed a 3% tax on public sector workers, before John Hutton published his final report on public sector pensions, and then refused to negotiate on this crucial issue. This surcharge has nothing to do with the sustainability of public sector pensions and will hit public sector workers on low incomes hard.

It increasingly seems that the government is happy to see a disruptive strike. According to the Daily Telegraph, David Cameron has privately said that he is ‘delighted’ that the unions have walked into his ‘trap’. This is no way to approach the long term needs of the country and workers who believed they had a deal on their pensions when they set out on a public service career.. The constant mantra about “gold plated” pensions is quite frankly insulting. The average pension paid to pensioner members is around £7,800 per year, while the median payment is around £5,600. Half of women public service pensioners get less than £4,000 a year.

If more people opt out of occupational schemes because they cannot afford to pay this increase, it could end up costing the tax payer more in the future as more people rely on means tested benefits. The imposition of a 3% surcharge for all employees is not only unfair in the short term but also risks the sustainability of public sector pension schemes in the long term.

The government announced a three pence in the pound increase in contributions in the October Spending Review, long before Lord Hutton had published his final report. The 3 pence in the pound increase has nothing to do with the wider reform agenda outlined by Hutton. It is a measure which is simply geared towards paying down the deficit by squeezing public sector workers. The increase was imposed without any negotiation with public sector unions. This increase amounts to a 3p in the pound increase in tax for public sector workers, at a time when they are already facing a pay freeze, higher inflation partly driven by the government’s VAT increase, not to mention the biggest squeeze in living standards in a generation.

I know that people who rely on services don’t want to see a strike: from parents who will have to take a day off work to those who rely on home help. And public sector workers— nursing assistants, teachers and dinner ladies—also care too much about the people they serve day in day out to consider action as anything other than a last resort.

Rather than telling hundreds of thousands of low paid, part-time working men and women who are set to be much worse off that they should not strike, David Cameron should be taking responsibility and trying to negotiate a deal that’s fair to public sector workers and taxpayers alike. That is what I want to see and that is why I support the action that union members are taking..

My recent series of posts on pensions only skim the surface of why so many ordinary people decided to take strike action today.

Nearly one in five of us , living in the UK, is over the state retirement age.  A fair pension for all is affordable in the sixth largest economy in the world, if we choose it to be.

A pension is income deferred.  Whether it is through national insurance of contributions to an occupational scheme, we have set aside income today to pay for our pensions tomorrow.

We like to think of retirement as a time of relaxation and leisure, but for very many people it is a time of hardship and stress with a growing proportion having to choose between heating and eating.  Every winter tens of thousands of retired people die from cold-related illnesses.

We are all living longer and should welcome that life expectancy continues to improve, but those improvements have been very uneven, meaning that there is a huge life expectancy gap between the richest and poorest.  We must also consider the impact of working longer on unemployment, the impact that has on young workers staring off.  Youth unemployment is at the highest level on record.  Finally, we ought to acknowledge that longer retirements are not necessarily unaffordable, but are a question of priorities and balance.

The government is proposing little to tackle the scandal of private sector occupational pensions, or the poverty level of the basic state pension.  The government’s current attempts to cut public sector pensions will create more misery and more poverty in retirement.

UK pensioner poverty is among the worst in Europe – only Cyprus, Latvia and Estonia abandon their pensioners to a greater degree.  France spends over twice as much on pensions as the UK, Germany two-thirds more.

It is simply not true to say that the UK cannot afford better pensions when nearly every other European country does better by their pensioners.  The truth is that the value of the state pension has gone from being worth 25% of average male earnings to just 15%.

The basic state pension is currently £202 a week, worth only 57% of the government’s official weekly pensioner poverty level of £178.  Two and a half million pensioners in the UK live below that level.  Even before the above inflation energy price rises this year. 3.5 million pensioners lived in fuel poverty.

Many pensioners therefore rely on means-tested benefits like the pension credit, council tax benefit and housing benefit.  However, because of the stigma attached to claiming, over a million pensioners entitled to pension credit do not claim it.

Research by the Left Economics Advisory Panel estimates that the cost of means-tested benefits is £13bn per year.  This state of spending would not be necessary if private sector employers provided their staff in the same way as the public sector.  However, the proposed cuts to public sector pensions would mean that more and more public sector workers will be eligible for these benefits too.

The state pension age is currently proposed to rise from 65 to 66 by 2020, 67 in 2034 and to 68 by 2044.  We believe this is deeply regressive and will have a disproportionate impact on the poorest people.

Although the average person is living longer, there are massive inequalities in life expectancy: men and women in the wealthiest areas live 10 years longer, on average, than those from the poorest areas.  The wealthiest can often afford to take early retirement too, whereas the poorest often already have to continue working beyond the state retirement age.  Just because we are living longer, it does not necessarily mane we are fit to work for longer: 40& of people aged 65-74 have a disability of illness that limits their quality of life.

Pensioner poverty also intensifies the prejudices that exist over people’s working lives.  Women, disabled and ethnic minority pensioners are far more likely to be in poverty because they are discriminated against by employers.

Over several years, governments have allowed companies to abandon their pension duties to their staff, allowed the state pension to fall further and further behind living standards, and today’s government is now attacking public sector pensions too.

We don’t want equality of misery, but fair pensions for all: public, private and state pensions.

The collapse of private sector pensions is one of the greatest outrages of our time.  Just over a decade ago nearly half of all private sector workers were in a workplace pension scheme; today it is only a third.  The cost of that decline will be borne by the taxpayer through increased eligibility for means-tested benefits such as pension credit, housing benefit and council tax benefit; greater health and social care costs; and an increase in our already shocking levels of pensioner poverty.

However, while pensions have been ripped away from ordinary workers, the directors of large companies continue to net very generous pensions averaging £175,000 per year in retirement.  These generous fat cat schemes at the top lapped up the bulk of the £37.6bn in tax relief that private sector pensions get every year.

The only reason why companies have dumped pension schemes is to give more money to senior management and more profits for shareholders.  Corporate profits have expanded from 13% of GDP in the mid-197s to 21% today, and executive pay has risen several times the rate of the average worker.

In the 1990s, according to Inland Revenue figures, corporate Britain saved itself £18bn through pension holidays, while employees continued to contribute.  As the stock market declined many pension funds went into deficit – employers cut pensions rather than repay the monies avoided.

This graph shows the proportion of private sector workers in defined benefit schemes (red line) compared with corporate profit margins (grey line).  What the graph shows is that in the last 13 years the level of corporate profits has remained relatively constant, yet companies have closed defined benefit schemes at an alarming rate.

The number of private sector employees in defined benefit schemes had fallen from 34% in 1997 to 11% last year.  At the same time the proportion of workers in any occupational scheme has fallen from 46% to 34%.  Despite all the talk of corporate social responsibility, fewer and fewer companies show any responsibility to their own staff.

For the 11% of private sector workers still in a defined benefit scheme the average pension is £5.860 – about the same as the £5,600 average public sector pension, which demonstrates that is that is not a ‘gold-plated’ amount.  In fact it is less than half the income of a full-time worker on national minimum wage.

It has been estimated that changing pension indexation from RPI to CPI in the private sector would save employers £100 billion over the lifetime of existing schemes.  This would be a direct transfer or wealth from employees to shareholders.

Women in the private sector are likely to be in a far worse state than men – not just because of the earnings gap – but because many of the jobs done by women in the private sector (especially retail, catering and cleaning roles) come with no pension provision at all.

The media is full of scare stories about the escalating and unaffordable costs of pensions, and that people are living too long.  The reality is that employers are failing to pay their share – and that is unfair.

In 2012 the National Employee Savings Trust (NEST) will be established for workers with no occupational scheme.  However, NEST will take more from employees than employers and will not provide a decent pension.  The main beneficiaries will be the private pension industry.

Attempts to pit private sector workers against public sector workers are divide and rule.  The responsibility for the removal of pensions for private sector workers lies with employers and shareholders.

Private sector pensions are also heavily subsidised by the taxpayer.  Research by Richard Murphy shows that private sector pension schemes received £37.6bn in tax reliefs in 2007/8 – that same year they paid out pensions worth only £35bn.  As Murphy states, “Pension fund performance over the last decade has been a history of almost perpetual loss making despite the enormous subsidies.”  A quarter of that pensions tax relief goes to the richest 1%.

The pensions of public sector workers have come under intense scrutiny in recent months, with ministers and the media describing them as ‘gold-plated’ and ‘unaffordable’. Currently public sector workers are being told they must pay more and work longer for a lower pension – but is this necessary?

Last year the government asked Lord Hutton to lead an independent commission into public sector pensions. His report showed that their cost is falling over the long-term as the graph above demonstrates; falling from 1.9% of GDP today to a little under 1.4% by 2060.

The graph above does assume the government’s change to pensions’ indexation from the RPI inflation measure to the CPI measure.  This could reduce the value of the pensions by over 20% over the course of an average retirement.

However, a report into public sector pensions by the National Audit Office, published in December 2010, does not take into account the indexation change, nor does it make any assumptions about the size of the workforce.  It shows reforms agreed between the unions and the government in 2007-08 “reduces costs to the taxpayers by 14%” and “long-term costs are projected to stabilise around their current levels as a proportion of GDP”.  So even without these assumptions the costs are still not rising, but stable.

The Hutton report also “firmly rejected the claim that current public service pensions are “gold plated” …the median payment is around £5,600″.  This equates to just over £100 per week in retirement.  For a woman worker in local government the average pension is just £2,000.

Despite these facts taken from the government’s own commissioned report, ministers have continued to misrepresent public sector pensions and are simultaneously attacking the age at which they retire, how much they pay, and how much they get at the end.

This attack on public sector workers’ pension rights coincides with a pay freeze and, for many, their job being under threat too.  A significant minority of workers have said they will opt-out of schemes if they are forced to pay more for a smaller pension.  Opting out will mean a larger burden on the taxpayer in extra means-tested benefits.

It is only four years since public sector pensions were significantly re-negotiated with the previous government in a deal that meant for new starters the retirement age rose to 65, and future costs capped.  The pensions deal in 2007 was assessed in December 2010 by the National Audit Office, which found it “on course to deliver the saving and stabilise pension costs”, and will save £67bn for taxpayers.

The strike on 30th June gave the issue of public sector pensions increased profile in the media and exposed the government spin about affordability.  The government now says it’s about fairness but its proposals will lead to an inequality of misery: unfair to all.

In effect the coalition government is imposing a tax on public sector workers to pay for the mess made by the banks:  George Osborne said as much in parliament, “from the perspective of filling the hoe in public finances, we will seek changes that deliver an additional £1.8bn of savings per year in the cost of public sector pensions”.

There is also an ulterior motive in cutting pensions, as it will make public services more attractive for privatisation.  The CBI boss John Cridland has said public sector pensions are “a brake on competition and make it harder for those in the private sector to bid for public service contracts”.

As the next chapter demonstrates, private companies have withdrawn providing fair pensions to their employees, and they do not want fair pensions for public sector workers transferred to them.

Trade unions representing millions of workers are fighting this attack through legal action, political campaigning and industrial action.