The late Peter Cook famously lamented that he could have been a judge, but never had the Latin. One can understand his ambition from reading the report of the Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB), published this week.You may ask why. After all, judges are to get a modest 1.5% pay rise, less than the 2.6% recommended by the SSRB. And their salaries – handsome though they appear to the man on the Clapham omnibus – don’t come close to what the best of private practice has to offer.

But what caught my eye, as a former City reporter used to trawling annual reports to find out what people get paid, is judicial pensions.

Did you know that judges pay just 1.8-2.4% of their salaries to accrue a final salary pension at the rate of 1/40th for each year of service, up to 20 years?

This is quite staggeringly generous. Let’s say you’re a judge earning £170,000 a year – halfway up the ladder. For a modest outlay of about £34,000 before tax at current prices, you can retire after 10 years’ service on an annual pension of £85,000 for life. If you live for another 20 years, that’s a cool £1.7m from the taxpayer.

Even better, this is a final salary scheme. Move up the ladder, and you stand to get far more.

I spoke to Tom McPhail, head of pensions research at Hargreaves Lansdown, to put this into some sort of context. He points out that judges’ pensions are plated with even more gold than those of MPs, who pay 11% of salary to accrue in annual fractions of 1/45th. To his knowledge, only the governor of the Bank of England (1/30ths) fares better in the public sector.

I am not suggesting that judges’ pensions be cut, necessarily. For its part, the SSRB report points out that it is ‘important to assess the value of the judicial pension as a substantial part of the reward package’. Quite so.

But consider where we stand now. In the aftermath of fiscal meltdown, the next government is certain to put public sector pensions firmly in the line of fire as it moves to cut public spending. Indeed, some of the popular newspapers are already doing so, wise to the fact that final salary schemes have more or less been consigned to history in the private sector.

There is a precedent here. In Australia, attorney general Robert McClelland recently raised the prospect of stripping new federal judges of the lifetime pensions that currently cost taxpayers about $55m every year.

There’s a neat postscript to this blog post. McPhail reminds me that one of Lord Falconer’s gifts to the profession was to make a special case for judges and remove the requirement that tax relief on personal pension savings be limited to the lifetime limit – then £1.5m, now £1.65m. So once judges hit that limit they are exempted from paying 55% tax on their contributions. No wonder he’s a popular chap round Lincoln’s Inn way.