We are guests of Pensions UK and I sometimes forget that it’s pensioners in the UK that we are looking after. I went to my friend Enid’s funeral last Tuesday. She was 98 and she lived off her pension happily till the day she died. The money that came out of that pension was created by investment when she stopped looking after her children  (in 1980).

The DC system of saving takes us half the way but not the whole way. Enid would not have survived happily into her 98th year had she not had the financial support of a pension.

This is very important to remember when we consider the inefficiency of DC pension saving which does not invest money in growth assets but encourages savers to take money in cash when they slow down or finish working. People do take their money (the FCA studies show they do so in huge numbers) because there is no pension to be paid to them.

Now we are in a position to pay people pensions from the money they save through the whole of their lives and in doing so , we can keep their money invested in growth assets from the days when they star (let’s say their early twenties) to the day they did (think of Enid). This is where the extra pension comes from.

By being part of collective schemes, people like my son (in his twenties) to those like me (at retirement age) and those like Enid and my Mum (close to being centurions) can have confidence that they will get decent pensions.

I asked yesterday in a session, how we will we judge the Value for Money of a CDC scheme. The answer will in time be by comparison to the pension paid by a retirement income paid as a default by a DC scheme using drawdown or buying annuities Here growth is made but retained by the insurer and financial adviser and the scheme. Necessarily this way of doing is inefficient to the pensioner who gets up to 60% less than they would get under CDC.

You may think that 60% figure is wrong, but it is endorsed by several companies and by the PPI and by my Pensions Mutual numbers.

Which is why I am at the Pensions UK Conference to ask the question why are we not looking at getting the money not into Pensions UK but into the Pensioners in the UK.

We really have spent too long paying people too little in retirement when we could pay them more and why we have avoided paying them the full value that their money earns is quite beyond me.

Today we will have Torsten Bell talking to us about pensions and then WTW talking about CDC. I won’t some straight talking about VFM and CDC and why the Pensioners in the UK aren’t getting the value that Pensions UK should be arguing for.

I know why people don’t get the full value of their pensions and I know they should . I will not be quiet about that! We need a way to get the growth that invested money makes, into the hands of those  owed up to 60% more pension.