Fallout from pensions timebomb will hit so many
Whatever the economic and social divisions scarring life in Britain today, they will begin to sink into insignificance once the pensions timebomb that has been ticking away for ten years finally explodes.
It won't harm the current crop of private sector retirees (those whose occupational pensions are paying out reasonable sums), public sector employees or the better-off who can afford to divert a sizeable portion of their income to financing their old age.
MPs' pensions, it goes without saying, are absolutely copper-bottomed. They can vote themselves an increase any time they like and leave the taxpayer to foot the bill.
No, the victims will be those among us who expect to be wandering off into the employment sunset in the next five years or so.
That will be when the catastrophic destruction of private pensions triggered by successive governments - it really isn't all Gordon Brown's fault, although he deserves all the opprobrium he gets - which have nurtured the illusion that the way to make company pensions safer is to make them more expensive to administer.
The bomb has been made even more powerful by stock market slumps and the blithe manner in which companies treated themselves to pension payment holidays in the fat years without bothering to work out how they would make up difference in the lean years.
Add to that the fact that pension actuaries failed to spot the fact that people are living longer and are therefore costing their pension schemes more and you begin to see why the UK has gone from boasting Europe's best-funded pensions to the worst in a decade.
A glimpse of the scale of the problem that will face the country when large numbers of its senior citizens will be living in poverty is contained in a report by the friendly society LV (it used to go by the name Liverpool Victoria until the branding experts got hold of it).
This shows that an estimated two thirds of people approaching retirement are convinced that because of rising living costs and falling income levels they will not have enough to live on.
They will need, on average, £20,100 a year to get by on, they say. Their income, however, is likely to be in the order of £16,900, according to LV's maths.
From where I stand, £16,900 a year looks a bit on the optimistic side.
In an age when private sector job security has all but disappeared, it won't
be too long before retirees will be picking up small amounts of money from a number of sources each month, which, even combined with the state pension, won't add up to financial security.
An awful lot of us are going to be working on well into our 70s, I fear.
Some people I know are already impairing their current living standards by putting aside hundreds a month out of their post-tax income in order to make a marginal improvement to their income when they retire.
Others, younger, can already see that the pension numbers don't stack up and are saying to hell with it and are enjoying life now.
Can't say I blame them, but it augurs ill for the future.
