What was claimed
The civil servant responsible for increasing the state pension age to 67 is retiring at age 61 with a £1.8 million pension pot.
Our verdict
Missing context. The civil servant in question, Sir Robert Devereux, actually retired as permanent secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions back in 2018. The figures for his pension at that time are broadly correct. Civil servants are “responsible” for developing and implementing policy, but not for policy decisions themselves.
A number of Facebook posts have recently shared an image which makes several claims about the former permanent secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Sir Robert Devereux KCB.
We first saw this image shared around six years ago. But, as we’ve said multiple times since, it’s missing some context.
The posts claim Sir Robert is “Retiring at 61 with a £1.8 million pension pot”, and that “He’s the secretary for the Department for Works and Pensions”. But these claims are outdated.
As we’ve explained before, Sir Robert actually retired from this role in January 2018, over seven years ago, not recently, as the posts imply.
Based on the DWP’s annual report and accounts, it’s true that by the end of the 2016/17 financial year he had accrued a pension with a cash equivalent transfer value of around £1.8 million. The report noted that Sir Robert had opted out of the Principal Civil Service Pension Scheme (PCSPS) from 31 March 2012, but had “voluntarily agreed the disclosure of his preserved pension figures”.
The DWP annual report and accounts for 2017/18 (the year in which Sir Robert retired) didn’t include an updated figure for his pension, and noted that he had opted out of the PCSPS and “as such there is no requirement to disclose his pension values”.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Sir Robert has worked for an American cloud-based software company, Salesforce, since September 2019. More recently, Sir Robert has conducted an independent review into the performance and culture of the Office for National Statistics.
It’s worth noting that permanent secretaries and other civil servants do not make policy decisions themselves. Sir Robert was permanent secretary at the DWP from 2011 to 2018, during which period the timetable for planned increases to the state pension age was accelerated, but he wasn’t part of the department when plans to increase the state pension age to 67 were initially legislated for in 2007.
And while Sir Robert was in post when the timeline was accelerated in 2011 and in 2014, these decisions were ultimately voted on by politicians in both Houses of Parliament.
We’ve written in more detail about the claims included in the image here.
Online claims can spread fast and far, and are difficult to contain and correct. False or misleading claims online, as well as claims in which key information is missing, have the potential to harm individuals, groups and democratic processes and institutions.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as missing context because Sir Robert actually retired as permanent secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions in 2018, and as a civil servant he was responsible for developing and implementing policy, not for policy decisions themselves.
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