The streets of Scotland will be even more dangerous unless we stump up extra for police pensions. That was the warning this week from the chief constable of Tayside, John Vine. He says staff numbers will be cut in order to meet a funding shortfall and this will mean fewer bobbies on the beat.

This is not to suggest that the plods of Dundee need fear for their income in old age. Vine himself, who is leaving his post in July to lead the new border and immigration inspectorate, could choose to retire to, say, a second home in France if that is how he decides to spend his feather-bedded senior years.

Police officers, like all public servants, are guaranteed a gold-standard final salary pension, index-inked against inflation. That is expensive. Private-sector organisations faced with similar pensions shortfalls to Tayside Police have cut provision. This option never occurred to Vine, who wants central government to take direct responsibility for the fund. He shares the same sense of entitlement as all those employed by the state.

Everyone’s pension has become more expensive, because we live longer, stockmarket returns are poorer and fund growth was damaged when Gordon Brown changed the tax rules while chancellor. His raid partly went to fund the growth of the public sector, meaning lots more people entitled to a crème-de-la-crème retirement. Employees in business therefore lost their final salary schemes. Anyone working for central or local government, the NHS, the police, fire services or associated quangos have no such worries. David Craig, author of Squandered, about government waste, calculates that taxpayers forked out £18 billion last year to fund public-sector pensions — more than the £15 billion paid into company or personal schemes in the same period. If you work in the private sector — as most of us do, even in Scotland — you pay for two people’s pensions. Your own, and that of some public servant you’ve never met.

You may of course feel that the police deserve a quiet and comfortable later life, given the dangers they face, and you are happy to fund that from your own taxes. But how happy are you to throw your hard-earned dosh into the bulging pot of Adam Crozier, the Scottish chief executive of the Royal Mail, who saw his pay raise by 21% in 2006 to £1.25m, even though he cancelled the second postal delivery and raised the cost of stamps? You also subsidise the top 300 bosses in the state sector, who saw their pay soar last year to an average of £237,564 according to a Sunday Times investigation of fatcats.

Pensions are the great divide in our society — the new haves and have-nots. It’s incredible that we don’t all boil in frustration at the unfairness of it all. According to the Association of Consulting Actuaries, only 900,000 private-sector employees are in final- salary schemes, compared with 5m public-sector employees. Most of these can still stop work at 60, while the rest of us have been warned we might have to graft on until the age of 75 just to pay the heating bills.

Unions like Unison will argue their members deserve the best, and the best isn’t good enough anyway. Striking intermittently over the 2% pay award, they will point to poorly paid cleaners, dinner ladies and home helps who struggle to feed their families. These workers, they argue, have little security and are hardly in the clover when they get old.

When the Liberal Democrats last year set up a commission to look at the sustainability of all this, Unison accused them of “stoking pensions envy” and said the average local government pension was currently £3,800.

Of course, there are many low-paid workers cleaning hospitals and schools. But there are a great many more in, say, our service industries who get no pension whatsoever. The lowest earners in Britain are waiters, bar staff, playgroup leaders, laundry workers and checkout operators, according to research conducted last year by another union, the GMB. Many of them would doubtless welcome £3,800 a year from the age of 60. As it is they must scrape by on a basic state pension that continues to shrink.

There used to be a perception that public-sector jobs were lower paid but added security compensated for this. But this is no longer accurate. Many educated middle-class people work for the state in white-collar jobs and are well rewarded as well as secure. In 2006, pay rates for new graduates recruited into the public sector surpassed those of private firms for the first time. This was back in the days when Brown was still Father Bountiful. There was even a debate in which businesses complained of difficulty competing for staff because state employment had become so attractive. In Scotland alone, there have been 60,000 new posts created since devolution. Thanks to the current squeeze, that increase has halted. But taxpayers will bear the burden for decades.

Scotland’s auditor general, Robert Black, warned us two years ago that the government had underestimated the cost of public-sector pensions by £53 billion. Similar shortfalls exist at UK level. Between now and 2020, government spending on public-sector pensions is likely to rise by 50% as a proportion of GDP.

Meanwhile, the services we get in return for our generosity are far from deluxe. We fear going to hospital lest we catch C Difficile. If we are rushed there by ambulance, our personal details might well end up in the hands of the Kosovan mafia when administrators lose information discs in transit. Children in state schools are not even guaranteed tuition. A Scottish father whose daughter had no English teacher for four months before her exams threatened legal action last week after the school, local authority and central government all refused to give him an explanation.

Those at the top of the public-sector pyramid, looking forward to the most generous pensions, are also the most incompetent. Two out of three public building projects in Scotland over the last five years have gone seriously over budget, according to official figures. Railway links, hospitals and gallery extensions soared in cost because initial estimates were “too optimistic”, according to Audit Scotland. In the private sector they would be fired. But these senior mandarins and managers will be rewarded as retirees — with as many rounds of golf as they can manage at Gleneagles.

joan.mcalpine@sunday-times.co.uk

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