Member

The Minister has previously pointed to a PwC report that suggests that all this will make significant savings, but of course that is not how it has worked out in Somerset. I am fresh from chairing the Local Government Pension Committee this morning, and I can tell the House for the first time that that PwC report makes no allowance for the pension strain costs of all these reorganisations and the astonishingly eye-watering pension strain costs that will allow senior local government officials to take retirement on a full pension at either 55 or 57 on “efficiency grounds”. I heard today that additional pension strain could easily be £500,000 per person. In their haste, the Government are sleepwalking into a billion-pound pension strain black hole entirely of their own making.