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I am sure my memory is playing tricks on me, but I cannot remember what was wrong with British democracy in May 1997 that since then we needed over 2500 new laws to shore it up. But, sadly, that is what we have had.

However, in this orgy of law-making, like most things created by committee and those steeped in theory, what needs to be fixed remains as broken as it was the day we took our eyes off the ball of constructing a just and fair society.

This is what they call in the economic analysis of law the liberal theory of social welfare, based on the so-called Pareto Principle - basically that the vast majority of society look after the unfortunates – in the Pareto case a ratio of 80:20. There is more to it than that, as argued by Amartya Sen and others, but for the purposes of this Comment piece let us leave it there.

More important, take the mess that is our pensions system. Simple: with our pay-as-you-go system of state pensions, the working generation, through its national insurance and tax payments, pay for the current generation of retired people.

However, because we are not reproducing as previous generation did, by the middle of the century the number of retired people as a percentage of the population will be such that this system will become unsustainable.

We have briefed our civil servants, politicians and technocrats - Lord Adair Turner and his Pensions Commission, Ron Sandler, Alan Pickering, Tom Ross et al - with the simple task of fixing the system.

Of course, the Pension Commission followed the £5bn a year raid on defined benefit schemes launched by the then chancellor Gordon brown in his very first Budget in May 1997, which led to the virtual collapse of the best occupational pension system in Europe at the time.

So, government pretence at trying to resolve the crisis - which its own perverse fiscal policy created - was, to say the least, duplicitous.

But, in fairness, Lord Turner produced a report, at least the first volume of which, Pensions: Challenges and Choices, in time, will become the definitive work on pensions for generations to come.

Like most of these official reports, however, it is in the recommendations where they fall down and Turner’s is no different.

Its call for a personal account system, driven by auto-enrolment, was fully accepted by the government and will come in to force in April 2012.

And here is the rub: if government talks about a pension crisis and introduces a stakeholder regime with a minimum contribution of £20, then the natural assumption is that that is the minimum to meet any individual retirement needs.

Equally, if government introduces a semi-compulsory personal account regime, with an eight per cent contribution – made up of member, employer and state contributions - then the natural assumption is that that combined contribution rate will meet the individual’s retirement needs.

There is nothing so far about government policy that gives the impression of any real understanding of the framework for a long-term saving policy.

In fact, as that old cynic Kevin Carr of LifeSearch, soon to be with PruHealth recently observed, are we asking the right questions. Should the preparation for retirement provision be based on savings or protection? But that is another issue altogether.

However, the department for work and pensions - which spends about £130bn of public money on benefits every year and has suffered the indignity of having its budget qualified by the National Audit Office - has revealed that the figures in which the personal account is based will do very little to lift low to medium paid people out of grasp of pensioner poverty.

For example, someone earning £25000 a year who contributes to personal accounts for 20 years will see his retirement income increase from 31 per cent of salary to 34 per cent – due mainly to the government's perverse obsession with means testing.

In other words, the tens of millions of pounds spent in a desperate attempt since May 1997 to devise a workable pension system has had the equivalent effect of discharging excess body fluids in the Thames.

You just could not make it up. There must be a collective noun for this collection of waste matter who, with their blue chip pensions, almost daily waste public money only to tell that same public that they do not have a clue what to do about resolving the pensions crisis.

A recent study by Hargreaves Lansdown, the Bristol-based IFA firm, has found that for the average worker not to retire on benefits he or she would need a pension pot of just under £44000.

Not much, you may say, but when you consider that the average pension pot is about £30000, then you see the mountain we have to climb.

This therefore is the challenge we have set ourselves and which, both as individuals and as a society, rather than face we play a game of three monkeys – cannot see, hear or speak.

I am sure that most of the time spent on making 2500 new laws, many of which were unneeded, could have been spent on finding a solution to this pension mess.

But the art of government is not to have joined up thinking. Why not ask ordinary people what they think is needed, when the institutional belief in Whitehall is that they too silly to understand even their own needs?

It beggars belief that this government can hand out a universal benefit such as child trust funds to the welfare as well as the hard-up, when the much-loved means test could have separated the wheat from the chaff.

There are other burning questions: why not hypothecate national insurance contributions?

Why are the trade unions apparently struck dumb when it comes to the public conversation on their members’ pensions? And, do we need to hive off a new government department for savings from the Inland Revenue, now with a supercilious title of HMRC, which does its best everyday to undermine cash Isas, one of the few jewels in the government’s crown?

According to 1970s pop star Johnny Nash, there are more questions than answers.

Hal Austin is editor of Financial Adviser