My immediate reaction when reading the latest state of play on the Lifetime Allowance abolition was to wonder why anyone is going to get unduly worked up about it.

There appear to be relatively few cliff edges for the unwary to fall over and considerable expertise devoted to this relatively small part of pensions. The clever trick pulled off by HMRC is to keep enough of the old legislation and protection in place , to satisfy people who had been provident in planning around the protections. This includes the advisory community.

The main concern is over the Lump Sum Allowance (LSA) that could be as high as £375,000 if you get the right certification, but will generally be £268,275 meaning that some wealthy people might end up paying up to 45% less on crystallising around £107,000 of cash. Of course that money may itself become taxable once drawn so HMRC is likely to get some or all of the £50,000 back in time. Yes, there are some quirks around protecting the Lump Sum Death Benefit and the Overseas Transfer Allowance but these are matters for tax-planners rather than pensions experts. There are some irreversible decisions on certification but there is nothing that might be called a bear trap.

As is mentioned by Scottish Widows’ Robert Cochrane, HMRC are to be congratulated for introducing this major change in pension taxation without too many bumps in the road.

Overall, you have to feel that HMRC has got rid of some extremely obstructive tax legislation and allowed those who have earned well, saved hard and had benevolent employers, to draw pensions without fear of punitive tax. It is a matter of celebration that many people have had a problem with the LTA, would that it was a general issue.

But the reality is that most people’s private pension entitlements (pot and pension) will struggle to provide them with lifetime income equivalent to the state pension. General adequacy remains the preserve of the public sector where a lifetime’s service can still mean replacement pension ratios (including state pension) of getting on for 100% of pre-retirement income.

It is public servants who have been most at risk of falling foul of the old LTA, since even career average pensions for senior civil servants, teachers and NHS workers can easily breach the £53.000 pension limit, before penal taxation would have applied. For those who commuted lump sums, the pension limit was below £50,000.

Treating people with retirement incomes at this level as wealthy and subjecting them to 55% tax seems wrong.  Encouraging them to opt out of good pension schemes to avoid penal pensions especially wrong. The Lifetime Allowance had become a glass ceiling for aspiring pensioners that was set too low.

Inevitably, the LTA will be treated with disproportionate interest in the press and by the pension community. Tax-advice for higher earners is much more pleasant to think about and give than help to people struggling to make ends meet.  And of course, the high earners are – in terms of human resource – more valuable to a company. I do not blame pension departments for concentrating on the issues surrounding these limits.

But when all is said and done, the advice gap is not around LTA but elsewhere in the system and the central issue most people have to contend with is not with having too much, but too little retirement income. We must not allow ourselves to over-indulge in the pension complexity of these new limits to the exclusion of the main job in hand, to get ordinary savers up to moderate or comfortable standards of living in later life.

There remains the possibility of a reversal of this policy if a Labour Government comes in, but that possibility is receding fast, not least due to the skilful implementation of the new rules.