My solution to the pensions crisis: let’s fill the gap with grannies

In the sixth form, I sat next to Adair Turner, now Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, the pensions prophet whom the Chancellor has left crying in the wilderness. Turner was cleverer than the rest of us, deeply serious and dedicated to his studies; a gifted loner who sat apart from the brutish cut and thrust of public school life. The description still seems to fit, except for ‘public school’ read simply ‘public’. He was an uncomfortable fish out of water as director-general of the CBI, a job that consists chiefly of getting your ear bent by grumpy businessmen over breakfast, lunch and dinner — which must have bored him — then periodically trying to grab a headline by bashing the government or the unions, which his successor Sir Digby Jones has been doing vigorously this week, but which was never Adair’s forte. A deep-thinking two-year enquiry into the future of pensions, on the other hand, was right up his street, and I felt a pang of sympathy for him as he watched his meticulous 500-page report being fed into the furnace of animosities between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

I have sympathy, too, with the proposition apparently favoured by Turner, that the pension age should be pushed back to 67. We expect to live longer than previous generations and the economics of the shrinking ratio of productive workers to pensioners is blindingly obvious. But just as important, the prospect of continuing to work for as long as we remain fit is far more attractive than it used to be. As heavy industry has withered and technology has advanced, work has in most cases become less damaging to the limbs, eyes, lungs and heart, less repetitive, more stimulating to the mind, and more flexible in hours and location. What comfort is there in spending the tea-time of your life slumped in front of Richard & Judy if your evening years are going to be spent worrying whether your shrunken pension will cover your soaring gas bill? Far better to remain fruitfully occupied, in one way or another, for a couple more years.