Retirement crisis - Pensions nettle must be grasped

In the face of escalating and ever more frightening warnings around pensions, and the very real prospect of real poverty for hundreds of thousands of people and their dependants, the Government’s inaction on this festering crisis seems at best recklessly negligent.

At its worst it seems indifference almost criminal in scale.

It is hard not to think that if public employees’ pensions were as threatened as most private sector pensions are, that this issue would not remain pretty close to the top of the political agenda until it had been resolved. In many instances this threatened shortfall has materialised and workers have retired on a fraction of what they funded and anticipated. Many more still working have been told that their expectations, expectations paid for over a lifetime’s work, will not be delivered.