CONFIDENTIAL
Foreign &
Commonwealth
Office
File
で
585
2 November 1992
BY FAX (via Comcen 2/11ter)
Mike Waters Esq
Civil Service Branch
11th Floor, East Wing
Central Government OfficesHKA 233
Lower Albert Road
HONG KONG
233/1
London SWIA 2AH
Telephone: 071-
Dear Mike,
HMOCS: PRIVATE SECTOR PENSION SAFEGUARD
1.
We have now reached agreement with the Treasury at the working level on an options paper. The paper can be finalised when we have all the necessary statistics; this should take only a few days.
2. The private sector pension safeguard option has been included in the paper at the Treasury's request despite the observations made by Mr Gray of Hong Kong Bank in his letter to you of 7 October.
3. The Treasury have pointed out that Mr Gray has not ruled out the possibility of a private sector scheme without an external guarantor, although they do accept that this would increase costs, possibly making such a scheme prohibitively expensive. They are discussing this option further with the Bank of England.
4. We need to ensure that our Ministers are in a position to argue convincingly that the private sector option has been fully explored and that it is not a runner. It would be of considerable assistance to us if you could go back to Hong Kong Bank one more time asking them whether they could provide a scheme with no external guarantor and, if so, how much would it cost. I suggest that the best way of doing this would be to ask them for a quote based upon a specific case; a suitable example might be a Chief Inspector of Police who will be retiring in 2002 aged 55 with 25 years service, and who wished to protect from 1992 the maximum commutable portion of his pension.
wat.let.ADM
SLM
CONFIDENTIAL