Eurocrats demand pay rise as pension costs hit £85 billion

European taxpayers will have to stump up £85 billion in the next 50 years to pay for the fat-cat pensions of Brussels civil servants, says a study for the European Commission.

Eurostat, the EU statisticians, gave the requested information to the commission in a 20-page report.

While the commission is backing a three per cent pay rise for public servants, Eurostat shows the real cost of the pension plans — an extravagance that leading German daily newspaper Bild called "a gigantic avalanche" bearing down on the continent's taxpayers. About 50,000 people are employed as bureaucrats at the EU, in Brussels, Strasbourg and other administrative centres.

Eurostat says that pension costs are currently running at £700 million a year but will double in 20 years and by 2046 will be around £2.12 billion annually. The number of pensioners on the EU payroll, according to Eurostat, will rise in 10 years from 17,471 at present to 25,432, and by 2046 will be nearly 39,000.

Almost all of them qualify for a pension equalling 70 per cent of their pay packet upon retirement, at a time when such generous schemes for ordinary workers are imploding across Europe. Many EU officials take early retirement, meaning they will draw their benefits for longer than the average person.

Bild said that it had seen internal EU paperwork of the EU claiming that on average the early retirees were drawing the euro equivalent of £4,226 a month.

Last month the commission published plans for pay rises for 35,000 public servants, which led the staid Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany to write: "European taxpayers are at the barricades with news that the wages of EU civil servants could go up again."

The planned pay rises have to be approved by EU-appointed judges at a court in Strasbourg — judges who would themselves qualify for the pay rise if they approve it.

Already the highest paid civil servants in Europe and with the largest perks — for example, trips to their homeland cost the European taxpayer about
£40 million a year — the proposed new increases are provoking widespread anger.

Carl-Ludwig Thuiele, deputy head of the FDP party which is in Germany's conservative-led coalition government, said: "EU officials are big earners compared with their German colleagues. It is not doable if, despite the economic crisis, they are now insisting on this pay rise. It is high time to examine automatic increases of EU salaries."