The Pensions Commission (II) is sitting and will be for the next year. It will be receiving information from a number of sources as it thinks about how to reorganise the financing of Britain’s retirements. It is no doubt a target that the FT has for this heavyweight read on the problems facing not just the UK but Europe and America , as demographics change and our capacity to pay for a longer ageing population is strained.

When we take the phrase “generous state pensions”, we can still distance Britain (though ours are due to rise as others fall)

But to see the state pension as the determinator of poverty or wealth would be wrong. There are many more nuances. This is charting the revenue people get back from the State in payment to bank accounts but there is also financial welfare, healthcare and subsidy of housing costs to consider in my question “can we afford our nation getting old?”.

For those of us who haven’t got access to the FT “big read”, I include this free share and you can email henry@agewage.com  if this link wears out.

For those who don’t click, here’s the conclusion of the article.

Some economists believe that a far simpler solution to Europe’s pension peril would be to revive its sluggish economy, which has grown at around 1.5 per cent per year over the past five years, compared with around 2.5 per cent for the US.

“The basic problem is that the economy hasn’t grown fast enough,” says Rupert Watson, global head of economics at Mercer. “It’s not what pensioners get is causing the problem — it’s the lack of economic growth.”

That is not a happy conclusion for those who are at or nearing the end of their careers and hoping they will be on a cruise line of comfort going forward. It is not like that. Last Thursday night and Friday I lay on an ambulance bed in a corridor in a Slough accident and emergency area. I at 64 was young. We do not have an NHS that can offer an emergency service to those who are growing old and this is as much part of the stress for older people as cash in hand.

Here is my friend Tony Watts explaining what the FT’s conclusion means for the readers of his daily email

The questions we have as we get close to retirement are well known to those on the Pensions Commission.

These aren’t tomorrow’s questions, they are today’s. They really are about how we care for our elderly now. The strategic question that ends the FT big read is matched by Tony Watt’s statement. We may feel like the woman staring at us over the washing up or like the old folk in the picture below, but either way – there is nothing that can let us dodge the question

Can Europe still afford its generous pensions?

It’s why we must so dedicate ourselves to ensuring our pension money is paid to generations to come as effectively as we can.

That’s why my blog’s strapline reads like this….