Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolhurst.

This week we're asking, can the government avoid a pensions crisis? Most analysts think the UK's

retirement industry is at a tipping point, and that without bold and meaningful reform,

even if they seem politically unpopular, then a time bomb ticking underneath

the pension system is going to go off. To discuss how ministers can ease the financial burden on the

current state pension, while making sure younger workers still have enough savings to retire

comfortably, how auto-enrollment and other policies can be improved, and how to tackle generational

inequality. I have with me on the panel, Guy Opperman, the former Tory MP,

who was the UK's longest serving pensions minister from 2017 to 2022.

Alongside him is David Willits, president of the Resolution Foundation think tank,

who also sits in the House of Lords and was himself a minister,

and Jonathan Cribb, Associate Director at the Institute of Fiscal Studies, who is leading on their pensions programme.

But first I spoke to Baroness Ros Altman, another former pensions minister, about the overall health

of the sector and what the government's priorities should be.

So, Ros, how would you summarise the pensions industry at the moment? And from a government

point of view, what exactly is there to try and sort out? Well, I would say that the pensions

industry is not rising to the challenges that we need it to rise to and that it could do

as a result of both the pension freedoms

that we've had in terms of the changes to the rules and tax implications, and also, of course,

in terms of helping to encourage people to put more money aside for their future if and when they can.

The insurance industry is waiting for someone else, usually they ask government, to say,

please tell all our customers to give us more money.

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