Prison Officer Pension Age

Lord Davies of Brixton Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My Lords, the Government will certainly continue to look at this policy. As the noble Lord says, the job of a prison officer is absolutely not like our job. On retention and short-sightedness, the Government currently have no evidence that the pension arrangements as such are affecting initial recruitment or are a factor in retention. There are many factors that affect retention, but pensions do not seem to be very significant in that package. The fact that lower contributions are paid is very attractive to a young man, who does not necessarily worry about what will happen when he is 68.

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, this situation goes back to the report of my noble friend Lord Hutton back in the early years of the last decade, in which he specifically mentioned that police officers should have a lower retirement age. The issue the noble and learned Lord needs to address is that, surely, the comparable profession for prison officers is police officers. The differential in respect of police officers, who fully merit their early retirement, applies equally to prison officers. Mentioning pension arrangements for the Armed Forces in the same breath illustrates the hole that the Minister is digging for himself.

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My Lords, my understanding is that the 2011 Hutton report to which the noble Lord refers made a distinction between certain uniformed services—the Armed Forces themselves, the fire service and the police—and everybody else. Part of the problem we are discussing has occurred because the noble Lord, Lord Hutton, put prison officers in the latter category, so they were brought into the general Civil Service pension scheme that came in in 2015, which, in fact, is quite a good scheme. For the reasons I have already given, the Government do not accept that prison officers are as badly off as is sometimes claimed. On the other hand, the Government are perfectly prepared to continue to consider and reflect on the points that have been made.