£347,000,000

[Gromit]

...paid City fund managers for Local Authority Gold Plated staff pension funds. The overall cost of the fees would be the equivalent of adding £15 to every council tax bill in England and Wales.

// Councils are paying out hundreds of millions of pounds in fees to City fund managers to run gold plated pension funds for their staff, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

In all £347million was paid out by the council pension funds to investment managers last year, up nearly 9 per cent on the £319million paid out in 2011..

The increase is more than double the increase in the value of the council pension funds, which went up by nearly 4 per cent to £158.6billion, raising questions about whether the taxpayer is getting value for money.
Tonight, Local Government secretary Eric Pickles welcomed the research and said it showed that councils should bring down the overall number of schemes to bring down the cost of the fees. //

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10082527/Councils-paying-hundreds-of-millions-to-City-fund-managers-for-staff-pension-funds.html

Do you think this money should be paid for out of the funds rather than by the Council Tax Payers?

[emmie]

why does anyone get a gold plated pension.

[youngmafbog]

The problem is tgat it does not work that way for salary based pensions ie the gold plated ones.
The public sector needs to get real and dump this type of pension like everyone else in the real world has

[modeller]

Gromit did you forget to mention , it was mainly the Labour councils
who were spending the most of tax payers money on the fat cats.
//For example fees paid by Lewisham jumped by 85 per cent to £3million and by 41 per cent to £8.7million in Durham.

Pension fund charges fell in other parts of the country, 39 per cent in Cambridgeshire to £2.8million and down 37 per cent in Richmond-upon-Thames to £675,000

There was also a big disparity between funds, with Kent paying out nearly £4million in fees to fund managers more than Lancashire, despite having a smaller fund.

A breakdown shows taxpayers in some of the country's poorest boroughs supporting payments to some of the City’s biggest fund managers. //

[emmie]

our council is as wasteful as it's possible to be, take care of themselves before their tenants.