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Superannuation Bill

I would like to focus on the average rather than the outliers, as that seems to elicit cries of outrage from the Opposition. It is an incontrovertible fact that if we look at the average redundancy payout and average compensation, we find that the average cost in the private sector in autumn 2008 was £8,981, while it was £17,926 in the public sector—almost twice as much. That demonstrates that we have reached a position where, on average, people are being paid twice as much to retire from the civil service as they are to retire from the private sector. There is nothing fair about that.