Now we know the scale of the pensions crisis, Mr Blair must set out a policy to tackle it

There is a sense in which the report produced by Adair Turner's commission on pension provision contains few surprises. For the past year or more, we have been fed doom-laden projections of how inadequately those of us who are working today are providing for our retirement. We are saving too little, living too long, expecting to retire too early. We have had it too easy. Something will have to change.

There is a sense in which the report produced by Adair Turner's commission on pension provision contains few surprises. For the past year or more, we have been fed doom-laden projections of how inadequately those of us who are working today are providing for our retirement. We are saving too little, living too long, expecting to retire too early. We have had it too easy. Something will have to change.

But there is also a sense in which the next generation of pensioners in this country has a right to feel aggrieved. Two decades ago, Britain was in the vanguard of long-term thinking on pensions and widely praised for its prescience. Almost uniquely in Europe, the Thatcher government acknowledged that the state could no longer be the sole, or even main, provider of pensions. Individuals would have to take more responsibility for themselves if they wanted a decent standard of living in retirement. The next generation of pensioners obediently heeded the message; the private pensions industry boomed.

We are now looking if not at the ruins of that policy then at its severe distortion. Private pensions have not proved to be the panacea we had hoped. While demography has continued its inexorable course, the financial projections have come to grief via a sharp fall in the stock market, sky-high fees levied by private pension companies and scandalous mis-selling to employees who were often better provided for in existing state or company schemes.

A considerable portion of blame also attaches to the present Government. It was Gordon Brown who decided to tax pension fund dividends, taking £5bn a year out of private pension funds and skewing the calculations on which they were initially set up. It is Gordon Brown, too, who has been so parsimonious towards savers as to have ended saving as we knew it. Not only are interest rates so low as to run almost into negative territory after tax, but the few tax incentives that remain - on ISAs, for instance - are being withdrawn.

Is it any wonder, then, that taxpayers with spare cash look for places - outside the stock market and savings accounts - to invest it? Is it any wonder, either, that many alight, more often than may be sensible, on buy-to-let schemes, where tax incentives are still to be had. We consumers may be poorly informed about finance in general and pension schemes in particular, but we are not utterly clueless.

The Turner commission has analysed the predicament we are in and set out the solutions with admirable clarity. In the end, however, it has told us almost nothing we did not know already. It has established that there is an embarrassingly large gap between the money needed for pensions and the money actually being set aside (by the state) or saved (by individuals). And it offers four, all too familiar, remedies: acceptance of a lower standard of living in retirement; higher taxes; a rise in personal savings; or later retirement. The commission has made no recommendation, on the entirely reasonable grounds that this will have to be a political decision.

That the Government is making no recommendations until after the election, however, smacks of political cowardice. It is time for a lucid policy on pensions that recognises what is wrong and sets priorities for change. These could reasonably combine a rise of two or three years in the retirement age, encouragement to employers to retain or recruit older workers, and incentives for savers - including a review of the means-tested benefits that can be such a disincentive to the less well-off to save.

Above all, however, we need a drastic simplification of a system that will, and should, continue to combine state and private provision. Time was when people could calculate with reasonable certainty what their pensions would be. Now, ordinary individuals need expertise akin to a degree in finance to manage their pension arrangements, and even the most prudent can be wrong-footed (consider Equitable Life). Most of us know why we should plan for retirement; the question this Government needs to answer is how.