How are they going to cover the cost of caring for their elderly?
The topic of pensions is normally guaranteed to send most people to sleep except for a few actuaries who are equivalent to the train-spotters of the financial world. However, in November Britons woke up to discover that there was a crisis with their pensions. After three years of deliberation and consultation, the chairman of the UK Pensions Commission, Adair Turner, had issued a report on the state of the UK pension system. It concluded that things needed to change if the UK was going to be able to afford to provide adequate pensions for its elderly population. The causes of the pension crisis have been well rehearsed over the years: people are living longer and too few babies are being born. Neither of these two factors should have come as any surprise. Life expectancy has been increasing for the past 200 years and shows no sign of slowing down, especially as the levels of smoking among the population has declined. Birth rates have been declining for the past 30 years, after the post
