To paraphrase: “Pension envy is a stage in personal financial development, in which those who believed in the private sector experience anxiety upon realisation that they do not have the pension they were promised …” Penis envy - Wikipedia.
Public sector pensions are not unusually large. But the suggestion that there’s something unfair about such schemes because they don’t turn out to have been written on toilet paper seems, well, sad.
VB
I genuinely lolled.
Well it’ll be a lot better than the one I have from BHS, I’m sure…
I guess it’ll be a lot bigger than the one I’ve got from HMG too. And my pension’s a good deal smaller than the one I would have got if they’d made me redundant earlier. Public sector pensions aren’t what they once were.
VB
Dunno I’m 45 and was talking to three NHS directors who I work with and they’re roughly the same age and we’re talking about their pension pots being at c£1m already and slightly more. I walked out and had a scream in the toilets.
Yes, they’re just incredibly generous, compared to eyewateringly so… 
All this pish about pensions.
I’ve got something like 10 different ones.
I just want the cash back, cos there’s no way I’ll make it past 53.
That is lazy. Why pay 10 sets of fees for 10 disappointments? Roll 'em all into one single, inevitably disappointing fund and at least have the satisfaction of being a minor irritant to 9 parasites…
…oops I meant fund managers.
Are they, um, typical of the public sector ? (That said, I’m not sure whether our man in Brussels is typical either … .)
My pension doesn’t come out of any kind of a pot. That would have required the government to set aside some actual money and that’s not what UK governments have done for a very long time (if ever ?).
Once upon a time public sector pensions (in the sense of what most junior public sector staff got) were non-contributory, final-salary and RPI-linked and if they decided to make you redundant then there was a decent chance that they would at least preserve your pension at the level you were expecting if you were old enough that there was little realistic chance of you being able to do that yourself. Those things were all on the slide in my final years working for the public. Instead the people at the very top, working under contracts much more like the private sector, got the sorts of deals you’ve described while the vast majority’s deals were being made steadily worse.
VB
I don’t know how it translates but these guys are Exec directors on the VSM pay scale. So basically a 45 year old has worked his way up since graduating and spent less than 10 years as an exec director and has £1m in his pension pot.
Ah the good old Peter principle at work in the civil service 
A bit better paid than typical public sector workers then 
. The figures on p29 here https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/240303/Pay_Framework_25_April.pdf and in the scale starting on p33 indicate that these people are mostly on 6-figure salaries and the ceiling can be well over £200,000 pa. If you’re making that annually then I guess you’d better have quite a few times as much set aside to maintain yourself ‘in the style to which you’ve become accustomed’ through the years of your retirement. Maybe our man in Brussels was in the same league (but the bulk of the Senior Civil Service seem to be taking home 5-digits rather than 6 if the median figures in Table 4.1 p33 here https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/518130/1027-WL-38th_Annual_Rpt_Sen_Sal_2016_Accessible_.pdf are to be believed). In any case it’s light years away from what the vast majority of public sector workers are earning.
VB
That and the schemes are now contributory, but still no fund that can be cashed in. I used to pay 1.5% for a widows pension and the rest was a nominal sum that gave me a half pay pension after forty years based on the best 12 of the last 36 months earnings. That scheme has now been shut down and we pay a contribution, still no fund, but this time it is a life average over thirty years (our contribution is essentially a pay cut). I transfer to the new scheme this year, my old pension is frozen to be eroded by inflation over time.
You can volunteer to take up a privately provided pension, with a fund, at 9% contribution each. Over time the Civil Service pension will no doubt be moved in full to this type of scheme which is in line with many existing Company schemes.
That’s what happens when you let the little piggies feed from the trough. It’s not just the NHS, every Civil Service Agency is the same. They have their Exec and Non exec Boards, tidy salaries and bonuses and pension provision. Our glorious leader is on about half a mil if his bonuses pay out. Funny that some of the new execs come from the same previous private sector employees, non execs for that matter too.
I think* that you can cash them in when you retire if they are below a certain amount, so in some instances it’s better to have lots of small ones. Since the fees are normally a percentage of fund value, it’s not inefficient to have this structure either.
As i don’t have a pension,i’m banking on leniant store detectives whilst shoplifting in my 70s
I’m just going to carry on working 'til I die 
It also spreads risk further.
Read this and look at the name of the ship the US navy used to test their weapon…