When the great and the good set up auto-enrolment, a big fear was that many people would opt out. In fact, on that level, policymakers turned out to have been overcautious.
The challenge has instead been that it has been almost too successful and the infrastructure for making the most of employer and employees' pension contributions has not caught up with the current scenario, which is that many people have generated a plethora of small and not-so-small pots as they move from job to job, and receive pension contributions in a new scheme each time they move.
There has been a realisation for a while that this is very inefficient, especially at the small end, with 12mn of deferred pots of under £1,000. But over the past 12 months or so the pace has stepped up at ministerial level to do something about it.
There are many moves, on multiple fronts, to find ways to reduce the number of pots, and schemes, and benefit from economies of scale.
The value for money framework, in train already for schemes of less than £100mn, would force schemes to disclose their performance, as well as their costs, and if they are underperforming they would have to merge with a better-performing scheme.
Pension dashboards, a long running plan to devise infrastructure and protocols to create platforms allowing people to see what is invested in their name and focus their minds on their assets, and potentially consolidate them, is on the cards.
There is also an imperative for schemes to invest in less liquid assets, a move that some have been asking for, but throws open the question of charges in an environment of super cheap fees, and the question of risk.
But it was last November, in the Autumn Statement, that a spanner was really thrown in the works.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced a consultation on a further overhaul of the defined contribution pension space, by instituting the 'lifetime provider' (or pot for life) model.
This would encourage members themselves to choose which fund their employer should put their pension contributions into, with the expectation that it would go into an existing pot.
This sounds fairly reasonable for someone new to the job market, who might be on their second job, and have one pot in existence into which their new employer can make contributions.
For those who have been employed for a number of years, who might have built up several different pots, the question becomes much more complicated, with a requirement for more sophisticated decision-making.
All of these would require the individual to make a choice, for themselves, about where their pension money should go. If there is one thing that the financial services industry is unanimous on, is that the British public is dramatically ill-equipped to make these decisions.
