First was a letter from Peter Vicary Smith of Which? where he berates, with abundant justification, the private pensions industry as "the most dysfunctional consumer market [with] A litany of mis-selling and other scandals ...". Then on page 3 there was an article reporting a proposal from the Engineering Employers Federation, applauded by Brendan Barber of the Trades Union Congress, proposing compulsory, instead of voluntary, contributions to private company pensions and the insertion of the Inland Revenue between the employers and the managers of the pension funds, whose faults are so roundly condemned in Mr Vicary Smith's letter.

Why should this eliminate the frauds, which Mr Vicary Smith (and the late Sheila McKechnie before him) have exposed so ably? Why should compulsion end scandals? What cost/benefit improvements would it bring to the pensions of ordinary retired workers? Will it eliminate the inbuilt tax avoidance that favours the better off? Why go in for privatised pensions at all when pay-as-you-go state pensions are shown to be far cheaper to run and more equitably distributed?

Mr Barber certainly needs to ask these questions too. What induces the TUC to turn primarily to a financial elite that have run the private pensions industry gravy train at so much profit to themselves for so long? Surely this is a significant cause of Britain having, according to the Turner Commission, "one of the least generous pension systems in the developed world".

Why not prioritise increasing PAYG National Insurance pensions instead?

Hugh Lowe,
Press Officer,
Greater London Pensioners Association,
London W3 9JF