𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

I must confess that when I arrived at the central London hotel for Reform UK’s latest press conference this morning, my heart sank somewhat when I found out what it was about. Being lectured about local council pensions at 11am on a Monday morning is not quite the ideal way to start a new week.

I’m sure the vast majority of voters and those of you reading this would feel much the same way. But hold up, because what Richard Tice presented to us was not just genuinely interesting, but exposed something that the country and our politicians should be paying much more attention to. Britain’s public sector pensions are a ticking time bomb.

According to the Office for National Statistics, we have £1.2 trillion worth of public sector pension liabilities, a whopping three-quarters of which are unfunded.

If we ever want to see taxes reduced from their current record high levels, or indeed want to get the cost of gilts – and therefore government borrowing – down, this is an issue that must be tackled.

Unfortunately, for obvious political reasons, it’s something our spineless politicians have refused to touch with a bargepole for decades. The time bomb, they hope, won’t explode while they’re still in office, and the potential for union-organised walkouts from the NHS, schools, transport and civil servants is very likely.

But not Reform. They have finally grasped the nettle in the areas they are in control of, namely 13 councils.

The findings, Richard Tice revealed, are shocking. In short, councils are paying eyewatering fees to asset managers for terrible returns, often in the name of Net Zero or other left-wing causes.

This is causing ordinary resident taxpayers to foot more of the bill, as councils’ investments fail to fund the enormous pension sums.

Whether Reform can force changes through at council level, or whether they will have to wait until they win the next election, remains to be seen.

However Richard Tice’s focus on the issue shows the value of getting some new blood into politics and looking at costly issues like public sector pensions with a new perspective and energy.

They claim this issue is costing taxpayers up to £10 billion a year, or £350 per household – something that could either be a sizeable council tax cut, or fund the social care system successive governments have promised to sort out.

This stuff may be drier than Reform’s wider ‘DOGE’ programme of rooting out waste at local government, but it is far more substantive.

One problem for councils, which politicians never properly explain, is that most of your taxes go on things like pensions and social care, or stuff they are forced to spend money on by the Government. Increasingly little goes towards the issues voters actually care about like potholes and bin collections.

Thank goodness Reform is being proactive enough to investigate this issue and highlight it. The question is whether they would have the bottle to go bigger on a national level should they win the next election.