You asked
Please let me have latest annual and other expenditure for the following:
Public sector pensions - taxpayers expenditure
HS2
House of Lords
Employee cars - staff eligibility, total number of cars, annual cost.
Quangos - please list and show cost each.
Foreign Aid - costs, who controls expenditure and who ensures that monies given are used correctly.
PCCs - How many and costs for each and totals.
Organised crime costs.
We said
Thank you for your request.
We have been unable to locate data at the level of detail you requested as we do not, generally, hold or produce economic accounts of individual bodies, or categories of bodies. We suggest that you contact the government departments responsible for each of the relevant bodies or activities directly, for example, the Department of Transport for information on High Speed 2.
However, we hold some information in relation to your question on public sector pension expenditure. While we do not estimate the fiscal impact of specific economic activities and therefore do not have a readily available estimate of taxpayers’ expenditure on pension, the information published in the UK National Accounts Table 29 ( https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoraccounts/datasets/uknationalaccountstable29accruedtodatepensionentitlementsinsocialinsurance ) may allow calculating the approximate impact. Expenditure on public sector pensions includes two broad categories – expenditure on social security schemes, such as the UK State Pension, and expenditure on government employees’ pensions. The former is reported in Column H of Table 29, while the latter is categorised by scheme structure, funded or unfunded, and reported in Column E and G respectively.
The majority of public sector employees are covered by unfunded employment related pension schemes, which are reported in Column G of Table 29. Such unfunded pensions are financed on a pay-as-you go basis, with no segregated pools of assets (funds) set aside for the purpose of generating investment return. The expenditure on pension benefits related to these schemes can be found in row 4. Depending on the nature of your interest, you may want to subtract from those amounts employers’ actual contributions (row 2.1) and households’ actual contributions (row 2.3). Employers’ actual social contributions (row 2.1) represents the amounts that are paid into pension funds directly by the public sector employers and are not deducted from the employees’ gross earnings. Households’ actual social contributions (row 2.3) are the amounts that the employees themselves contribute from their gross earnings. Indeed, both types of contributions would generally form part of the employees’ contractual remuneration package, and while they are ultimately an expense to public sector employers, they may need to be netted off from row 4 to obtain the net expenditure, that is, the expenditure on pension benefits that has to be financed from other sources.
It should be noted that the pay-as-you-go nature of such schemes make them sensitive to changes in the relative numbers of active and retired members. For example, a reduction in the number of public sector employees in a given year will instantly reduce the amount of contributions coming in (rows 2.1 to 2.3) but will only be transmitted into pension benefits payable (row 4) in the future years. To assess whether the increase in the pension entitlements accrued over a given period (and generally payable in the future) outweighs actual pension contributions by both the employers and the employees in the same period, it is useful to consider employers’ imputed social contributions (row 2.2). A positive estimate would mean that entitlements (and thus future payments) were growing faster than could be financed by the existing level of contributions, while a negative figure represents a decrease in the notional deficit of the pension schemes (or an increase in the surplus).
The expenditure on funded pension schemes is reported in Column E and generally takes form of social contributions (sum of rows 2.1 to 2.3). We explained that actual contributions would form part of compensation of public sector employees that is directed towards their pension and is either paid directly by employers, or contributed by employees from their gross earnings. Employers imputed social contributions (row 2.2), on the other hand, represent the amounts that ought to be paid by employers’, in addition to their actual contributions, to finance the change in the accrued pension entitlements over the same time period. Please note that imputed social contributions are expenditure in the statistical sense, in that they represent that potential shortfall in the pension scheme that it is estimated would ultimately need to be financed, but are not associated with any actual cash flows. In the case of funded schemes, the benefits are subsequently paid from a segregated fund, and thus are less relevant in the context of taxpayers’ expenditure.
Further information on concepts and methodology can be found in our publication titled “Pensions in the national accounts, a fuller picture of the UK’s funded and unfunded pension obligations: 2010 to 2015” (https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoraccounts/articles/pensionsinthenationalaccountsafullerpictureoftheuksfundedandunfundedpensionobligations/2010to2015 )