§ Mr. GardinerTo ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what assessment he has made of the benefit of joint industry and Government initiatives, including Commercial Awareness Training for HM Customs and Excise officers in targeting illegal imports. [106036]
§ John HealeyCommercial Awareness Training for Customs and Excise staff is designed to ensure that
716Wis that the introduction of entitlement to survivor pensions for unmarried partners in public service pension schemes should be covered by members of schemes who want the change to be made. But the same estimates of additional percentage points of pay to be made in contributions would apply to employer contributions if the costs were to be met by employers. The figures provided by the Government Actuary are given in the following table. In the schemes where the Exchequer provides the benefits, which are unfunded schemes, the annual net cash cost to the Exchequer would build gradually over a number of years before reaching a steady state. The Government Actuary has not made estimates of the profile of this build-up. In the pension schemes where local authorities provide the benefits (Local Government Pension Scheme, Police Pension Scheme and Fire Pension Scheme in the table below) the costs of benefit improvements financed by employers would fall to Council Tax payers rather than the Exchequer.
No estimates are available for the total public sector, as this would need to include a number of non-statutory pension schemes in the wider public sector on which data is not held centrally. The figures in the following table cover all survivor pensions including those where the death of the scheme member occurred after they had left active service; separate estimates identifying survivor pensions following death-in-service are not available. The table includes costings for making married partner survivor pensions payable for life (instead of ceasing on remarriage of the survivor) as this is conventionally assumed to be a change which should be associated with the introduction of unmarried partner survivor pensions for life, as in the new Civil Service Pension Scheme. The costs of making the benefit changes retrospective to cover the past service of active members at the date of the change are shown as the capitalised one-off additions to scheme liabilities which the Government Actuary estimates that this would create.
Customs understand their role in helping businesses, and to help businesses to be compliant. A foundation level guided learning package has been written with the assistance of representatives of businesses affected by Customs' work, and two pilot training courses have been held which were jointly designed, developed and delivered with them. It is planned to make this training available to Customs staff nationally later this year, once the pilot courses have been fully evaluated.