It really is too much. The industry has spent the last however many years working with government(s) and its agencies to deliver a brave new world for financial services.

A major part of that has been the painfully slow and confused development of what the retail distribution retail (RDR) will in fact deliver.

Now, the FSA has thrown a great big oversized spanner in the works with the launch (and release) of the Money Advice Service (MAS).

It really is too much. The industry has spent the last however many years working with government(s) and its agencies to deliver a brave new world for financial services.

It hardly seems possible that it is only a year since the coalition government came into being.

Pensions often seems to be an immovable object, rendered awkward by a mixture of indifference and inertia. But in the past year we have seen something of a revolution in pensions reform, moving from a ‘can’t change, won’t change’ attitude, to a ‘must change, how soon can we do it?’ mindset.

Nothing seems so easy and as difficult as trying to get people to do the right thing.

Anticipating change in the field of pensions can be frustrating. Like waiting for a bus, you stand there waiting for ages and nothing happens. Then, all of a sudden, two come along at once. In the pensions, those two buses are the long-awaited reports on the future of the public sector, curiously from two men named Hutton: John and Will.

If there’s one thing we all used to look forward to, it was the idea of reaching retirement and not having to work any more.

Friends of mine have recently acquired a Morris Minor (series 2 for the anoraks) and it was after looking it over that I couldn’t help thinking of the fate

of this engineering marvel without love and attention being expended upon it over the years. Compare that with our industry and there are many similarities.

The old model of occupational pension saving is like a 20-year-old car; it’s given good service, carried a generation of its passengers to their destinations with little fuss and minimal intervention on the part of the owner. Occasionally the regulator has intervened and it has been necessary to clean up the car’s act to comply with new rules.

The next year is going to be one of change. Yes, I know we always say that, but the coalition government has set out its stall on the subject of pensions and unlike previous administrations, it seems to mean action.

Isuppose there must be a good reason for coalition ministers prefacing every statement about the relative faults of the previous Labour government. Maybe there are statistics to show if you say something often enough it will eventually come true. It’s never worked for the Newcastle football team, mind.

Twenty-five years ago, something very special happened. For me, one of the highlights was Alain Prost’s absolute command of the Grand Prix racing in his second season of his second stint at McLaren.

You know when you hear something that may well be the height of orthodoxy, but you have that overwhelming feeling that it is just plain wrong?

Less the second coming of Jeremy Thorpe craved by the faithful, Nick Clegg is more from the same mould as Tony Blair. In other words, professional, highly motivated and absolutely convinced of his position in history.
Well, it looks like he may well have to take arms against a sea of trouble to cement that position if his pronouncements on the fairness of public sector pensions become a rally call and he takes the razor to that particular holy cow.

Some of you will be in little doubt that after years of being told pensions is a dull backwater, those doing the telling were right.

Who’d have thought that we, so clever and advanced in our modern world could be put in our place by an act of god?

Although we knew the first generation of Nest savers would face higher charges to defray the set-up costs, I would have preferred to see the taxpayer footing the bill.

This month I was going to offer a jaundiced squint at Hector Sants stepping down as chief executive of the Finan­cial Services Authority. After all, he had the audacity to blame institutional investors for creating the environ­ment that led to the credit crunch when the country was asking questions of the regulator he represented.

Now, I may be in the minority here, but the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority’s (PADA’s) decision to rebrand personal accounts as ‘Nest’ – or the National Employment Savings Trust to give it is full monicker – is something of a joke. And it fell rather flat when I read the release.

Okay, so I’m a card-carrying member of the Ebeneezer Scrooge fan club, although I’m not so keen on his later work.

In 1919, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, or Lenin to you and me, wrote: “While the state exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no state.”

Now, although there has been a degree of backlash against capitalism in the last couple of years, I can tell you categorically that Vlad was completely out of whack on this one. Because as of last week, there was no freedom and it was the state what done it.

It’s always nice to be recognised for something, isn’t it? Even if we aren’t screaming out for attention, it’s nice when someone recognises something we’ve done as having some intrinsic value.

September is the start of the conference season and you can bet your bottom dollar that pensions is going to feature fairly high on the agenda.

They say it’s lonely at the top. No one knows that better than Gordon Brown at the moment. Not that he’s all that bothered I would imagine. After all, he’s someone who has never knowlingly demonstrated a propensity for camaraderie or bonhomie. Asceticism is not so much an ideal, as a way of life, for him; he probably gave himself a lift by putting Gloria Gaynor on repeat on his karaoke machine.

You know, it’s funny in this ever-changing world of ours just how much remains exactly the same. That’s not funny ha-ha, you understand, but funny in the understated, yet back-tighteningly awful way that things are sent to try us.

Unfortunately for us at PM – although I’m sure you’ll be sick of it by now – we went to press the day before the Budget, thus were unable to report what happened.

Some of you may have read an editorial I wrote for last September’s High Net Worth in which I complained (bitterly) of the ignominy of a system that allows individuals to assist in the creation of regulatory frameworks before moving into private sector with inside knowledge of all the potential pitfalls and loopholes.

I’ve got to tell you that I’m a bit disappointed. Well, really quite a lot disappointed, actually. Like many of you, I was looking forward to the Treasury select committee, where the former bank chiefs were going to get a roasting.

David Bowie has a lot to answer for.