This may come as a surprise to those immersed in pensions but the people that you see in your local streets or in towns or on the beach are not very interested in pensions and why should they be.

I do not need about the engine of the train that takes me to Waterloo in the morning and those I help provide pensions care much that I’m doing that work. They want a pension paid to them after charges have been taking which is fair value.

There are a conscientious minority who want to know that the money is invested in a sensible way. According to Christopher’s article

Research by Hargreaves Lansdown has shown that less than half of Brits (47 per cent) know that their pension pot is invested.

A further 23 per cent claimed that they were unsure of what was being done with their retirement savings. There was also a gender gap, with 56 per cent of men recognising their pension is an investment compared to just 40 per cent of women.

Helen Morrissey, head of retirement analysis at Hargreaves Lansdown, says: “A pension is the longest investment most of us will hold and yet not many of us even realise it.

“To some extent this is understandable – people are auto-enrolled into a pension, and this can mean many do not actively engage with it. There’s also a language issue here – we talk about ‘saving’ into a pension, rather than ‘investing’ in one. It’s a confusion that must be dealt with if people are to make the most from their retirement.”

Why should they be? Why do we have to give people responsibility for driving the train?

I am not saying that because I promote a concept that does it for people, I would like interest of what goes on inside the train engine, but that’s only a few, only a few know if the engine is electric or diesel, some will work out what suits there view on fossil fuels and others may be keen on keeping the cost of the ticket down but most of us don’t have a thought to trains or to pensions.

If I worked for Hargreaves Lansdown, I’d stick to the people who want to know everything about investments that they can- they are good customers and they value Hargreaves Lansdown. But let’s not suppose that all the 47% of us who know that pensions are invested want to know how to manage the money that comes to us.

Let’s be clear, “pensions” is something done by someone else which is why so often pension money ends up sitting in lump sums in people’s bank accounts.