£6m pension fund held for 11 Trust Directors

THE expected collective cost of paying eleven Western Health and Social Care Trust (WHSCT) Directors’ pension benefits currently stands at £6,240,000, a sum which would be enough to keep eleven Londonderry workers on an average wage in work for 28 years.

According to the Trust’s accounts £997k has been accumulated in pension contributions and investments on Chief Executive Elaine Way’s behalf to pay for an accrued pension at age 60 of £197k.

Meanwhile, Directors Joe Lusby, John Doherty and Geraldine Gillick had accumulated £858k, £848k and £747k in Cash Equivalent Transfer Values (CETV) at March 31 and will come out with pensions of £173k, £161k and £137k respectively. Three other Directors had CETVs of £500k plus.

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At current rates the CETVs will result in annuity payments of at least £50k when the Directors retire. By contrast in September pensions experts at Hargreaves Lansdown estimated that the average personal pension pot for a 65-year-old in the UK had dropped in value to £91,840 since the start of the year and that the average annual pension was down from £6,497 to £5,571.

A spokesperson for WHSCT defended the pension pots stating: “The Western Health and Social Care Trust is a large complex organisation with 12,500 staff and a budget of approximately £500million serving a population of almost 300,000. The directors who lead this organisation are paid within national terms and conditions, including pension arrangements.”

But Hugh McCloy, a health campaigner from Mid Ulster, complained: “£35,388,000 of public taxpayers’ money is sitting in wait for selected health chiefs upon retirement at the age of 60 or when they leave their employment.”

Referring to the closure of the A&E Department at Mid Ulster Hospital in the neighbouring Northern Health and Social Care Trust (NHSCT) he asked: “Do front-line worker receive the same payments when they were forced to retire from hospitals that these health chiefs ran down and shutdown? £35 million would be enough to run the Mid Ulster A&E for nearly 6 years and would seem a better use of taxpayers’ money.”

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He added: “It is time for the Assembly to act, it is time for Health Minister Edwin Poots to act, the option of doing nothing is not acceptable from our elected representatives.”

He continued: “The health service is at its worst performance in Northern Ireland since the creation of the NHS, hospitals that were built to saves lives have been crumbled, front line social care services to help the sick live at home are stripped away from those most in need, this can only go so far before the backlash is such that the Assembly will not be able to control it.”