The arrival of the flat state pension was slightly overshadowed by the news that Tesco had been serving up horsemeat in its burgers. The two items headed up news bulletins for days, running in tandem as if to cement a link forever in the minds of the nation.
Was it a warning? Things can look yummy scrumptious on the packaging, but ultimately give you a nasty bout of indigestion. And so it may yet prove with the flat pension, which as ministers proudly boasted, won’t cost the Government a penny more. In the great pensions lottery, they are merely swapping the winning numbers.
Public sector workers who will be contracted back into the state system, but not see their occupational pension cut commensurately, are other big winners. Yes, they will pay more national insurance, but only the same as everyone else.
Even these poor dopes will have to wait much longer for as their occupational pension age rises in line with that of the state pension. Not a prospect many teachers and nurses will relish.
So where does that leave everyone else in the private sector and those who advise them?
Given the sharp rise in National Insurance contributions which private sector employers with contracted out schemes now face, it is a running certainty they will reduce pension benefits proportionately, or more likely close their schemes.
In reality, this has already happened, and we are well on track for the Turner dream to become reality. The original Pensions Commission envisaged a decent state pension topped up by private savings, funded via quasi/compulsory schemes a la auto-enrolment. It seemed like a very good idea at the time.
Brave new world for many people it is not. Youngsters today should not expect to pick up a pension until they are 70 and beyond.
It is callous to the point of cruelty to pretend that only the lazy will refuse to work into their twilight years. We all age at different rates and different jobs take a different toll.
MPs may be able to comfortably occupy their benches into their late 60s and thereafter move up to a softer seat in the Lords, but such ease of longevity applies hardly anywhere else in the real world.
Many people will simply not be able to continue working and face a sizeable income gap of anything between five and 10 years.
Attempts to convince us that we are fit enough to keep going, are hardly aided and abetted by our GPs, who seem intent on turning us into a nation of hypochondriacs. I hardly know anyone over 50 who isn’t rattling with pills having been prescribed with diabetes, potential heart attack or stroke indications, or cancers which may or may not be malignant.
The second big gap many will have to face is a new state pension shortfall. No, I didn’t hear that mentioned in any of the speeches either.
Millions will pay high levels of NI over a working life stretching way over current horizons, to get very little back from them.
Whereas their Serps pension could once have provided a basic state pension top up to anything up to £175 weekly – index-linked and with a spouse’s survivor benefit – future NI contributions will build a maximum £40 weekly.
Forget the row over child benefit. Those earning above average wages have just waved goodbye to an income of up to around £7,000 index-linked in retirement. That’s what I call a tax increase.
Still we are where we are, and that is in a very good place once you remember this exercise was never about better pensions for all, but making auto-enrolment work.
If, despite rising taxes and inflation coupled with wage pressures and falling living standards, the UK working population falls in love with pension savings post 2017, then the pensions industry will have finally reached Nirvana and the wildest dreams at the Treasury and DWP will have all come true.
More likely, millions will reach retirement only to discover, yet again, they have been sold a pile of old pensions horsemeat.
Teresa Hunter is a freelance journalist