Who will look after us in our old age? We’ll have to look after ourselves

An actuary’s life is more fun than it looks. You can make everyone’s flesh creep. Tell them all that their pensions are about to disappear into a black hole. Only the other day some financial astronomers measured the hole at a negative £130 billion and caused a most satisfactory flap. Could our pension funds really be short of so much money? Where has it gone? One answer, of course, is that it has disappeared into the Exchequer and been lost to sight. An incoming Chancellor, eight years ago, identified the pension funds as a soft target for taxation, and since then he has helped himself to their money so freely that they would need to raise another £100 billion to repair the damage. Put like that, without his intervention, they would only be £30 billion short today and we could all calm down. It is not as if they needed the money to write the cheques now.