Start with what a £100,000-a-year pension actually represents, because the figure on its own undersells it. An equivalent annuity could today require somewhere in the region of £1.3m to £1.8m, depending on age, indexation and survivor benefits — with an inflation-linked age-65 version towards the upper end — comfortably more than most people accumulate in a lifetime of saving. The investment risk and longevity risk that a private saver carries on that sum sits instead with the pension fund and, ultimately, its employers. That is a materially better deal than almost any private-sector equivalent on offer today.

The defenders' line — that 245 people out of 6.9 million scheme members is statistically trivial — is true and beside the point. Nobody is claiming the average council worker retires on six figures. The objection is that the number nearly tripled in five years (94 to 245, an increase of 161%) while the wider membership grew by just 23%, and that this happened inside a scheme whose costs are ultimately supported by local taxpayers through employer contributions and council finances. The defence answers a question nobody asked.

Look at where the money actually sits. Worcestershire alone accounts for 52 of the 245 — more than a fifth of the entire six-figure cohort, more than double the next-highest fund. That is not a broad-based feature of local government employment; it is a concentration of very senior, very long-tenured chief officer pay translating directly into very large guaranteed pensions in a small number of authorities, ultimately supported by local taxpayers through employer contributions and council finances.

The department's response — that the average LGPS pensioner gets £5,750 a year — is a textbook deflection technique: cite the average to make the outlier disappear. Both numbers are true and both numbers matter, because they describe entirely different things. The £5,750 figure tells you what a typical council employee gets. The 245 figure tells you what the most senior tier of council management has accumulated through the scheme, at a moment when many local authorities are pushing council tax to, or close to, the legal maximum because there is no money left.

There is a version of this argument that says final-salary mechanics inevitably produce some large numbers as long careers mature, and that's true as far as it goes. It does not explain a number that has nearly tripled in five years. That gap is consistent with significant growth in senior local-authority remuneration outpacing growth across the wider membership, banked into a pension formula that rewards exactly that kind of late-career uplift most generously. Senior pay awards are approved by councillors, not set unilaterally by the officers who receive them — but the scale of the gap between top and average outcomes is the part that deserves scrutiny, not the existence of large pensions as such.