Part-time judges granted a £2bn pension payday... by fellow judges More than 8,000 sitting and thousands more retired part-time judges will be entitled to a public-sector pension for the first time after the decision by Supreme Court judges By Robert Verkaik Cherie Booth QC will be among the judges to benefit from the Supreme Court ruling Taxpayers will have to pay a massive £2 billion to thousands of part-time judges after Ministers lost a seven-year court battle to stop them claiming the right to a pension. More than 8,000 sitting and thousands more retired part-time judges will be entitled to a public-sector pension for the first time after the decision by Supreme Court judges. Among the beneficiaries will be Cherie Booth QC and millionaire Tory MP Stephen Phillips QC. But none of the lawyers, many of whom have earned millions of pounds in legal aid, will have to contribute to their "free" pension - meaning the Treasury must find extra cash to settle the bill while at the same time cutting pay and pensions across the rest of the public sector. MPs, public-sector workers and taxpayer groups last night condemned the decision. Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming described the pensions payments as paying "silly" money to lawyers, adding: "It strikes me that there is a conflict of interest if judges are sitting in judgment about the amount of money in their own pensions." Matthew Sinclair, chief executive of the TaxPayers" Alliance pressure group, said: "This judgment will cost taxpayers a huge amount of money at a time when they can least afford it." Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the probation union Napo, added: "Everyone else who draws a pension has paid into the relevant pot and the same should apply to part-time judges. It's clearly not fair if someone can draw a pension when they've not contributed to it. Until now part-time judges, who are paid up to £800 a day, were excluded from the Government's generous pension deals reserved for full-time members of the judiciary. A typical final-salary pension for a part-time judge who has served 25 years will be worth about £125,000 - or £5,000 a year over 25 years. But some fee-paid judges who sit almost all year long could be entitled to pensions valued at more than £1 million. Hundreds of part-time judges who have retired have launched legal action against the Government to get back-dated pensions. The Government said it was justified in excluding part-time and fee-paid judges on the basis of fairness and cost, but the Supreme Court judges rejected that argument. Most part-time judges are wealthy barristers and solicitors who have made millions out of the legal aid system, have had successful careers at the Bar and already have their own separate private pensions. Lib Dem MP John Hemming, left, described the pensions payments as 'silly'. Tory MP Stephen Phillips QC, right, will be among the beneficiaries The decision to award them additional retirement payouts comes after a seven-year legal battle by a leading QC, Dermot O'Brien, who claimed the judicial pension scheme for salaried full-time judges discriminated against those who worked part-time. Mr O'Brien, 73, retired as a part-time Recorder in 2005. The barrister earned hundreds of thousands of pounds during his 27 years of judicial service, but argued that under European law it was unfair to deny him an additional pension. The Ministry of Justice said: "The recent court judgment in the O'Brien case on the employment status of fee-paid judges is complex and its implications need to be considered in full. It remains subject to further legal proceedings so the final outcomes and costs remain highly uncertain. It added: "The department has estimated that in the worst-case scenario the maximum possible exposure to the Judicial Pension Scheme could be up to £2 billion. There is no immediate cost to the taxpayer, and any future liabilities would be met over a period of several years. Paul Epstein QC, of barristers" chambers Cloisters, which represented Mr O'Brien, said: "Mr O'Brien illustrates the importance for both public and private sector employers of ensuring that pay differentials are not discriminatory. The Government had argued that for a number of different reasons the differentials in pay between part-time and full-time judges were objectively justified. The court decided in the end that all those reasons came down to cost, and that cost can never objectively justify discrimination. He told The Mail on Sunday: "So although in the current financial crisis there is often a limited budget available to employers, and it is up to employers to decide how much of that budget to use to pay employees, employers cannot discriminate between employees when fixing pay from that budget." Many people think judges are out of touch. This astonishing pension grab proves they are greedy as well. For an already highly affluent clique to insist on their legal entitlement to as much as £2 billion in extra pension perks - money which does not exist, and will have to be taken from future taxation - is an insult to the public they are supposed to serve. Britain is already convulsed by the financial consequences of having promised too much in pensions to too many civil servants. Not only has the cost become unsupportable, especially for an economy that is not growing, but the issue sparks division and resentment. There are the public-sector workers on the one hand with enviable, inflation-proofed pensions underwritten by the Treasury, and then there is everyone else battling to save for retirement when interest rates are the lowest in history. Judges sit in splendour at the very top of the pensions pile. Their entitlements are lavish beyond the dreams of the average saver. And the cost to the taxpayer is eye-watering. Currently, judges need to work for just 20 years to retire on the equivalent of half their final salary, which they can collect along with a handsome one-off sum. For a High Court judge, that could mean retiring on about £90,000 plus a £200,000 cash payment. Compare that to an average 65-year-old man wanting to buy an inflation-linked pension today from an insurance company. To obtain similar benefits to those enjoyed by the judge, he would have had to amass £2 million in his pension fund. If he were self-employed or a private sector worker, he would have had to contribute most of that himself. The Government is rightly seeking to cut back judges" pensions along with those of other public-sector workers. But the profession has so far proved highly resistant. This case, involving part-timers, suggests judges are hell-bent on taking everything to which they and their legal allies in the courts can argue that they are entitled to. The financial crisis has thrown up many cases where bankers and others have tried to prove legal entitlements to vast pensions and payoffs, but where shareholders and the public have furiously disagreed. A court may approve these payments to judges - but that does not make them right.