UK - Lord Turner, who chaired the Pensions Commission, has issued a broadside against the now-collapsed "house of cards" that was the UK's pensions system.

He argues a new pension system has to emerge from the "wreckage" of the failed approach of the past.

And he notes that Chancellor Gordon Brown's removal of tax breaks for pension funds in 1997 was not the only factor behind the decline of defined benefit schemes.

Turner lays the blame on actuaries' failure to identify changes to life expectancy and two decades of exceptional returns on equity investments.

"Together, these factors created a fool's paradise in which companies ignored the rising underlying cost of their pension promises," he writes in the Financial Times.

Turner's intervention is the latest following the revelation that Brown ignored advice about the impact of tax breaks on pension funds in 1997. The disclosure that was front-page news and led to a war of words between the government and business leaders.

Turner says Brown's decision was merely "one of the factors that pushed salary-related pension funds into deficit and spurred companies to close to new members".

"But it was not the fatal error that destroyed a golden pension system," Turner writes. "The system was only ever golden for a minority of the workforce, and by 1997 it was a house of cards waiting to collapse."

"The surprising fact is not therefore that salary-related pension provision collapsed, but that it survived for so long, with private-sector membership still standing at more than 5m in 1995."

He notes the 1997 tax change "accelerated that collapse".

But he says the system had "never worked for more than a minority of private-sector workers and was unstable because it was based on an absurd regulatory approach".

He concludes: "The new pension system has to be constructed amid the wreckage of that failed approach."

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