Anthony Hilton: Millennials work longer as generous pensions go to pot

The British “are woefully unprepared for their financial futures”, a survey has found. The average pension pot can require as much as £370,000. Most have no idea how much they will have to save — whether this figure or some other — to live a comfortable life.

Many haven’t started saving: more than a quarter did not have a pension pot, and although about half of those surveyed had one, they had no idea how much was in it. Women are less likely to have a pension than men — nearly a third did not have one, whereas for men it is one fifth.

The website Moneysupermarket commissioned the survey and wants people to wake up and do more. You can see where it is coming from. It is just unlikely to have any effect.

The present generation has, after all, embraced auto-enrolment and more than 90% of those eligible are in the system. It may not be adequate but it is a start.

There was nowhere near such coverage 40 years ago. Indeed how would people then have reacted to a similar survey? There seem not to be many extant surveys from the time — which some might say is because there were fewer PR people dreaming them up — but anecdotally it is likely that their response would have been the same as now, or maybe even more stumped.

People then were equally ignorant of pensions. Of the few who weren’t, some took the view that they were a rip-off. This was because in the Seventies inflation was between 10% and 20% and neither pensions nor life assurers could cope with that and give a real return to savers.

Companies had to pump millions into their pension schemes to keep them afloat, even when the schemes were not likely to pay out for decades.

People, particularly the young, thought they had better uses for their money — housing, for example. So they were either not saving at all, saving for a mortgage, or, having got one, saving harder still to cope with surges in interest rates. Remember 15% mortgages?

This meant most did not have much money. But they survived, or almost all did, and life went on.

The point is that all these people who were young then are now pensioners, or near enough. And what do we hear of them? Mainly that pensioners have never had it so good, that they have a reasonable way of life and, unlike so many others, they have rising incomes.

Defined benefit pensions made a difference to some people but fewer than you might imagine. Women in those days seldom had a pension; men in some cases did, but they were often small. Even now women lag behind.