This letter asks a question that poses the practical against the philosophic laws of outsourcing.

For those who reckon that privatisation is the way forward, we have been moving forward since the days of Margaret Thatcher.

For those who are subject to impact of outsourcing, there is little as important as the  administration of  payment of your and your colleague’s wage when in retirement. Outsourcing looks the heart of the problem.

But this letter is bang on. In a recent conversation held by the consultant and pension consultant Gallaher, Muntazir Hadadi Director of Pensions for First Bus, explained that while he would like to continue to run a pension for his and other bus-worker’s staff, he simply didn’t have the staff to do so. He may have had RailPen in mind, even employers with large workforces do not consider themselves to scale until of the size of master trusts. That is why we will probably only have one Royal Mail in this changing pension landscape.

It struck me as ironic that a firm that is itself managing a slice of what was once  nationalised services for bus and train travel, was itself no longer self-sufficient when it came to pensions. The fragmentation of the public into the private sector is apparent in many sectors.

There are very few large semi-private pensions left managing themselves. We think of the Local Government Pension Scheme, the Railways Pension Scheme and the University Superannuation Scheme as managing their own affairs but they are no longer properly “public sector” in the unfunded sense. These are large schemes that are subject to a high level of governance and its service providers a high level of accountability. To many of us in the private sector they are a model that could be repeated if we move back to collectivisation.

But the large public schemes that are unfunded are a problem. They include not just the Civil Service  but the NHS , Teachers, Fire workers and many smaller unfunded schemes. It is only when administration goes wrong that they make news for the private sector and that’s because it is today a private sector organisation which has taken over the task of accurately paying those, many of whom have no experience of anything but public service.

This letter puts its finger on the problem, it is neither right for the private sector to work without the proper scrutiny of those who pay them but nor is it right for the public sector to have lost the skills to be in charge. There is a governance shortage in public pensions that allows contracts to be awarded with little understanding of anything but cost. That is why the Civil Service pension scheme is

Those of us outside public service perceive Government as short on pension governance. This is a cruel irony, you cannot outsource governance of pensions.