A former Cabinet Secretary just banked a huge pension and taxpayers face a soaring bill

Lord Chris Wormald just got confirmed as a pension millionaire several times over.

Newly published government accounts show his Civil Service pension is worth more than £2.7 million. And he is not even working anymore.

He is 57. Sir Keir Starmer, then Prime Minister, removed him as Cabinet Secretary in February this year. He had only been in the job 14 months.

So that makes it one of the shortest Cabinet Secretary tenures on record.

And he did not leave with nothing. The accounts, published last month, confirm a severance package worth £859,495. That breaks down as £332,897 in contractual compensation and £526,598 in additional severance.

Here's the part worth knowing. Most of that money went straight into extra pension contributions.

So who signed off on this?

Cat Little did. She is the senior civil servant who approved the deal. But she could not say it was value for money. So she asked Sir Keir Starmer for a written ministerial direction before going ahead.

Starmer gave it. He said he was satisfied the public interest was met.

That's the Cabinet Office's own top official saying taxpayers were not getting their money's worth. And the Prime Minister overruling her anyway.

And Wormald is not the only one.

Dame Antonia Romeo, who replaced him as Cabinet Secretary, has a pension worth more than £1.4 million. Emma Churchill, who works on criminal justice policy at the Ministry of Justice, has one worth just over £1.2 million. Cat Little's own pension sits at £633,000.

The TaxPayers' Alliance found 14 "pension millionaires" across Whitehall last year.

So what explains pensions this big?

Well, Civil Service pensions moved from final-salary to career-average schemes back in 2015. But anyone who built up decades of service before then kept the older, more generous terms. Wormald, Romeo and the rest all spent most of their careers under those legacy rules.

And here's the twist. A court ruling in 2018, known as McCloud, found that switchover unfairly discriminated by age. Fixing it is expected to cost taxpayers an extra £17 billion.

Now the bill keeps growing.

Neil Record, a former Bank of England economist, has done the sums. He says total public sector pension payments — that's the NHS, teachers, the armed forces and the civil service all together — will hit £60.2 billion in 2027 to 2028.

That is about £2.7 billion more than the Treasury's own forecast of £57.5 billion for the same year.

Record says the Treasury's assumption that payments will fall does not add up. He calls the whole system badly out of date. And he wants civil servants to be able to swap some of their pension for higher pay instead, closer to how private sector staff are treated.

Now look at the contrast.

The standard employer contribution into a civil servant's pension is 28.97% of their salary this year. The legal minimum an employer has to pay into a private sector worker's pension is 3%.

The Government is expected to bring the civil service rate down to 22.32% from next year. But that will still dwarf what most private sector staff get.

And more than 3 million retired public sector workers are due a 3.5% rise in their pensions from April next year, in line with inflation.

So what does the Cabinet Office say?

A Cabinet Office statement says quote "reflect years of public service at the very top of the Civil Service, often under historic schemes that are now closed" and that Civil Service pensions were overhauled in 2015, ending final-salary schemes.

Labour has called the pension figures "technical valuations" that do not reflect cash payments the officials are actually in line to receive.

But neither answer touches the harder question.

Why does one retired official's pension pot run to £2.7 million, while a private sector worker's statutory minimum is a 3% top-up from their employer?

No minister has said whether the legacy entitlements or the employer contribution rate will be reformed.

And Parliament has not yet said whether it will press the point.