A quarter of council tax is used for town hall pensions

More than a quarter of all the money collected in council tax goes to pay the pensions of town hall workers, figures showed yesterday.

Council tax payers stumped up £5.4billion to maintain the gold-plated pensions of council staff, they revealed.

This amounts to just under 25.5 per cent of the total £21.2billion raised from council tax payers, or £290 of an average council tax bill in the year 2008/09.

It is exactly half the total £10.8billion cost of paying for town hall pensions in the year, with the rest met from the fund paid for by town hall workers' pension contributions.

An analysis last week from the Office for National Statistics showed that the overall bill to taxpayers for unfunded public sector pensions amounts to more than £16,000 each for every man, woman and child in the country.