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Where is the sense?

WHEN you join a pension fund, a kind of pact is struck. The employer says you put in £10 towards your retirement, I will match it. It is part of your benefit package in the same way as are holidays and sick pay. It is essentially deferred earnings.

The latest corporate collapses, Maplin and Toys R Us, are already being shown to have starved their funds in order to maintain healthy corporate salaries, bonuses and shareholder dividends.

A £37m hole exists in the toy retailer’s fund, while Maplin, owned through no less than six Private Equity vehicles (largely to avoid tax and allow it to successively buy itself via leveraged debt vehicles) has put paying itself 15% interest on its own loans ahead of its employees.

Forget for a moment Bhs… but take Carillion. How could auditors KPMG give this company, £5bn in debt, with £1bn owing to its pension fund and its 28,000 members, and just £29m in cash, a clean financial bill of health?

We have university vice chancellors routinely paying themselves three times the Prime Minister’s salary, whilst the Universities Superannuation Scheme has a £17,500,000,000 deficit. Yes, that is the right number of noughts!

In all these cases where are the big four bean counters, the pension funds trustees and the Government’s Pension Regulator?

When those in power systematically put their monster salaries and bonuses well ahead of funding this corporate compact and are forced eventually to throw in the towel, the Pension Protection Fund picks up the bill. But amazingly its liabilities, across all defined benefit schemes it now owns, exceeds its assets by a staggering £103 billion.

Is it any wonder that Governments seem unable to cope with all this in the private sector when the largest pension scandal in history will unfold over the next few decades.

John Stooke, Haydon End

Answer to congestion

The biggest cause of the congestion between J16 at Blagrove and Swindon is the stupid set of traffic lights controlling the exit from the hotel, Costa etc, and the exit from Blagrove by the car sales area.

They should be scrapped. The traffic exiting the hotel should filter in, as gaps occur in the traffic flow from J16. This could be enabled by a filter lane at the exit from the hotel, Costa etc.

There is sufficient land, and road space to enable this to be done. The exit from the car sales area of Blagrove should be closed.

Unless this is done, there will still be queues of traffic, including those vehicles trying to exit the motorway.

The road signage is okay for truckers, but this should be supplemented on overhead gantries, like on the motorways, then car drivers could see them and have no excuse for being in the wrong lane.

This I raised many years ago with the western area traffic office in Bristol. One pokey little sign appeared on the road side near to the entrance to the lanes for the M4 west.

Terry Lambourne, Royal Wootton Bassett