It’s time to end this injustice

It’s little wonder the Government is hardly rushing to end the injustice of the miners’ pension scheme.

At the last count, the Treasury had pocketed a nice little earner of £3.4billion.

And what, you may ask, has the Government done to ‘earn’ this eye-watering windfall?

Erm, absolutely nothing.

While miners toiled in conditions we can barely imagine these days for a relative pittance in pension pay-outs, the Treasury is raking in a whopping £51million a year through the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme.

The Government is, it has to be said, not breaking any laws.

The arrangement is clearly unfair, but one which was originally agreed for all the right reasons.

Flowing the privatisation of the coal industry in 1994, the Government agreed to be the guarantor of the scheme. The agreement protected the pension and, as part of the scheme, saw the Treasury pocket half of any surplus made by the pension fund’s investments.

What no-one expected, however, was the investments to be so lucrative.

While the average pension pay-out for the families of former miners is less than £4,000 a year, the Government has been earning millions.

What is most galling however is the fact that nothing of that money has been ploughed back into the scheme to help the miners and their families. And many of these pensioners are in poverty.

Ex-miners and their widows are struggling to make ends meet, and yet by tweaking the surplus deal the Government could benefit those more in need.

The injustice must be ended ... and swiftly.