Mark Serwotka jumps on the Ritchie bandwagon.

Research by the chartered accountant Richard Murphy shows that to the £25bn a year lost through tax avoidance, you can add £28bn in uncollected tax, and a massive £70bn in tax evaded by some very wealthy and very powerful individuals and organisations. Addressing just some of this scandalous hole in our public finances would obviate the need for any cuts to jobs, pay or public services

Er, no. Even if you accept Ritchie's tax avoidance and evasion figures (and I don't) you can't then add on the uncollected tax figure. The first two are revenue items, i.e. they're recurring numbers that Richard Murphy believes ought to be paid over by recalcitrant taxpayers, but aren't. The uncollected tax figure is a debt, i.e. it's the cumulative balance of taxes that have been levied but which haven't yet been paid over. If Dave Hartnett were to wave his magic wand and convince all debtors to cough up, there'd then be nothing left in the pot for next year's deficit.

The Serwotka line comes from a Guardian article in which he complains how mean the civil service is for trying to renegotiate civil servants' redundancy terms. Now, it's often said - unkindly I should add - that public sector workers do nothing for their money. But the terms that the unions want left alone are as follows:

Some officials can now get redundancy payouts equal to three years’ salary or even longer if they have worked for over 30 years for the Civil Service. Under the new proposals, designed to save £500 million, these have been cut to a maximum of two years’ salary and could result in tens of thousands of pounds being knocked off workers’ compensation payments.

That's right - three years' salary for doing nowt. Given that the most generous private sector terms are, I believe, one month's salary for every year of service, even the proposed revised terms of two years' salary look unnecessarily generous, especially given the public sector's favourable pension terms.

I suspect that taxpayers will take a fairly dim view of being asked to continue to fund the featherbedded terms of public sector workers, especially given the size of the deficit. It's time for the public sector to do its bit to bring it down.

People who read this post also read:

• The joy of Richard Murphy
• A very strange idea indeed
• Why pensions tax relief should be at the marginal rate
• Yet more Ritchiebollocks
• Are you sure, Ritchie?

Filed under: Current issues, Politics with tags civil service, deficit, mark serwotka, pensions, public and commercial services union, redundancy, richard murphy