What Hutton actually says.....

Frances Maude, Danny Alexander and other Coalition ministers quote "former Labour Pension Secretary" Lord Hutton's report in every second sentence to justify the claim that public sector pensions are un-affordable.  Unfortunately, they have clearly never read what Hutton actually says.  Thanks to Mehdi Hassan in the New Statesman for this:

"One final point: can we, once and for all, nail the right-wing lie that public-sector pensions are "unaffordable"? The cost of public-sector pensions is set to fall in the coming decades. Don't believe me? The Hutton Report, commissioned by the coalition government and used by ministers as a justification for the "reforms" to pension contributions, states on page 22:
There have been significant reforms to the main public-service pension schemes over the last decade, including increased pension ages for new members and a change in the indexation of pensions from RPI to CPI indexation. Some of these changes have reduced projected benefit payments in the coming decades. For the interim report, the commission asked the Government Actuary's Department (GAD) to project future public-service pensions expenditure. It projected benefit payments to fall gradually to around 1.4 per cent of GDP in 2059-2060, after peaking at 1.9 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010-11.


But, as Jon Snow's interview with the Cabinet Office Minister, Francis Maude, on Channel 4 News on Monday evening revealed, the government seems totally unaware of the contents of the report that it commissioned -- and that it now chooses to hide behind."