Adair Turner, head of the government's advisory Pensions Commission which will issue a report this week, says that there is a £57 billion hole in Britain's retirement savings. What can government do about it?

Butting out of the pensions sector would be a good start. Government gives tax relief on pensions savings: but nobody understands it; it's hugely complicated (the amount depends on your age, sex, and employment status); that throws up innumerable anomolies; those in turn require constant changes in the rules; but since you can't tear up people's long-term saving contracts, you end up adding new rules to an already over-complicated regime.

Gordon Brown hasn't helped, by seeing pension funds as a nice little Treasury earner and socking them with nearly £6 billion a year extra tax - about the size of Turner's black hole. And by making means-tested benefits higher for pensioners, he has made it crazy for most people to save - they lose a pound of benefit for every pound they have in their private pension plan.

Could we fill the hole by making pension saving compulsory? Tony Blair and Downing Street think that will simply be seen as a new Labour tax. They're right. And the Australian experience shows that if people are compelled to have pension savings, they simply save that much less elsewhere.

No. Only two things will solve the pensions crisis. First, if government must help people save for retirement, make it easy. Give people £1 or 50p for every pound they save themselves. Or scrap front-end inducements altogether and scrap tax on pensioners' savings incomes. And tell them they don't have to put all their savings into an annuity, as they do today - just so long as they have enough to keep them off social benefits.

Second, recognize that people are fitter and living longer, and doing nicer jobs that they don't want to retire from. Britain's favourite weatherman, Michael Fish, has been forced to retire at 60 simply because he is a civil servant. Why? It's no wonder that the UN calculates that by 2050, we will have only two people in work for every retired person they have to support. The state pension age is 65, the state pension system is bust, and state pensions aren't big enough to live on. In the long term the best thing might be to privatize it like Chile and other countries have done. But if you are going to keep it, raise the retirement age to a realistic 70. That means you can pay a state pension higher than the means-tested benefits level, so people won't lose out by saving privately.