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<p> </p><p>The Government is committed to providing good quality public service pension
schemes and encouraging saving for retirement. Firefighters will continue to get one
of the most generous public service pensions available – over £19,000 at age 60 after
a full career (based on a firefighters’ salary of £29,000). Many firefighters who
transfer to the firefighters’ pension scheme 2015 will see a reduction in their employee
contribution rate of around 2 percentage points in 2015-16.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
</p><p>If a firefighter opts out of the pension scheme, this reduces the long term
liability for the taxpayer but increases the short term top-up grant paid by the Department
to fund the shortfall in scheme income. Overall, this would be likely to result in
a long-term net saving for taxpayers, but we have not undertaken the actuarial work
to calculate a precise assessment. This is because we would encourage firefighters
to remain in the scheme, given it remains an extremely good defined benefit scheme
– an equivalent private pension pot would need over half a million pounds of funding
and require firefighters to contribute twice as much.</p><p> </p>
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