Almost everyone who is anyone in this country, from our Prime Minister to the Governor of the Central Bank, from the Leader of the Opposition to leaders of as yet unelected political parties, from leading economists to those spearheading changes in the pension system, agree that the pension system needs to be reviewed. The question is not really about if but when?

With all the restructuring going on, with all the efforts to curb our deficit, remodel our entities (with so much negative publicity of late!), reduce tax evasion, reform that is needed in the rent laws with all the impact this will have on small businesses and ordinary residents, funding the new hospital and the whole healthcare system, pay for our fuel and other huge challenges, with all this being squeezed into this first full term as EU members, the question really is... Is this the right time to tackle pensions, or pension reform? And, most important of all, do we have solutions that are affordable, tenable and usable?

I was interested to read what David Spiteri Gingell, the former chairman of the Pensions Working Group said, as quoted in a headline in The Malta Independent on Friday, “the minimum pension guarantee should be around 50 per cent of the average wage”. Now that sounds good if you are earning between Lm14,000 and Lm20,000, but what about the average Maltese salary of a miserable Lm5000 plus?

Won’t half of nothing be nothing at all? The trouble is wages are phenomenally low in Malta when you consider the cost of things, so what will half of a very low wage leave many of tomorrow's pensioners with, other than a life of grinding poverty?

I clearly remember Margaret Thatcher launching, and very quickly implementing, a wide-ranging reform of the pensions system towards the end of her term of office. I have no doubt she consulted all the experts. I have no doubt there were massive reports and studies. I have no doubt there were many working groups and consultation was thorough.

But at the end of the day the standard of living of pensioners did not improve one bit. In fact, pensioners in the UK now are worse off than ever before because there are these special grants to help them pay for heating in the cold months, and other handouts, which are actually a disgrace in one of the richest countries in the world.

It seems that rich, clever people all over the world impose changes in welfare for apparently all the right reasons, but the end result is always that other rich, clever people, (and these rich, clever people are inextricably connected and glued to each other!) be they consultants, financial institutions, pension companies and others, reap tremendous financial benefits while ordinary people see their standard of living being whittled away.

After all the UK had something similar to this two tier system now being proposed here, (which was then scrapped again!) when they had a State Earnings related Pension scheme (SERPS) system.

Many thousands of us were encouraged, or indeed forced, by the government to contract out of the government system and put our money into a private pension fund. Of course there were and are no guarantees at all with private pension funds, so if these private funds collapse, or are mismanaged you lose out in a big way. Hundreds of thousands of people in the UK have been very badly bitten by the goings on at the Equitable, to name one example of a private company gone wrong, a company many people invested their money in (or were encouraged to by their employers) because it was meant to be cleaner than clean, with the salesmen and women not working on a commission basis.

It also worries me how families on a low or even a medium income can find the spare cash to put extra money into additional pension funds. When you are lucky to cover all your costs at the end of the month, with costs spiralling ever upwards, from food to petrol, from electricity bill to school fees, where are you going to find the extra money to put away? After all if we all did save more and stopped consuming so much, the economy would suffer anyway so what is the solution? Do we want restaurants and shops to close, as we spend less and put savings into pension funds?

I am extremely concerned about the government rushing into pension reform, though I do believe it is doing it for all the right reasons and with the best of intentions. I don’t know of any country that has sorted out this problem (and who we could learn from!!) so it may be wiser to wait, look and learn before rushing into enacting something impractical and unsustainable that will not make tomorrows pensioners better off anyway!