SWINDON Council has a pensions deficit of more than £151million, according to figures released by the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

The pressure group warned that local authority schemes nationally are a ‘ticking timebomb’, with a combined deficit of £54bn between 2010 and 2011.

Swindon has assets of £307,608,000 and liabilities of £458,982,000, the report showed. The deficit works out at £750 per head of population, according to the figures.

The shortfall across the country is lower than in 2009-2010, when it totalled £94bn, but is higher than in 2008-2009.

The Alliance claims that £1 in every £5 of council tax was spent on employer contributions to the Local Government Pensions Scheme.

Matthew Sinclair, director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “The deficit in the Local Government pension Scheme remains a ticking timebomb that’s being left for future generations of taxpayers to deal with.

“With an ageing population and a crisis in the public finances, generous final salary schemes like the LGPS are inflexible and too expensive, and need urgent reform.

“Councils should not take false comfort in the improvement in the stock market.

“Their pension liabilities continue to far outweigh their assets and the situation remains worse than two years ago.”

Swindon Council referred to a response from the Local Government Association. The organisation said more money was going into the scheme than being paid out.

Sir Steve Bullock, the LGA’s workforce board chairman, said the TPA’s latest figures were a ‘snapshot’ of the funds’ financial health taken in the aftermath of the recession.

He said: “It is a spurious way of gauging the viability of a pension scheme and this year-old figure has no relevance to the actual cost of local government pensions.

“The fact that the nominal deficit fell by £37bn in just a year shows that we are getting it right and that the supposed ticking timebomb is already being defused.

“We will continue to work to ensure the ongoing viability of local government pensions.”

The Alliance’s report came from research into all 101 local government pension schemes in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

It said it obtained the information from local authorities’ annual statements of accounts in 2010-11 and used actuarial estimates for assets held by councils and their liabilities to calculate their overall funding situation.

It said Birmingham had the biggest deficit, measured in terms of the balance of its assets compared to its liabilities, of £1.3bn, while Glasgow was among 14 local authorities to have a deficit in excess of £500m.