The usual nail-in-the-coffin/dagger-to-the-heart comments from yet another so-called pensions professional. So-called professionals have served this area very poorly in my view over a very long time.

Final salary pensions will continue in the public sector and also among enlightened parts of the private sector, including a few industry-wide schemes. Pensioners and trades unions and others may even show more fight to keep their pensions alive?

If so-called pensions professionals like Mr Fleming wish to be more constructive (having been party to so much destruction since the 1980s in my view) then they could look at solutions such as consolidation into industry-wide arrangements which may serve members and future members better. By "better" I mean better than an insurance industry/pensions buy-out world which is offshore, off-message and just as capable of mis-selling as Equitable Life and other examples show.

And if complexity is part of the self-created, self-serving problems Mr Fleming sees, then some re-reading by him and others of the simpler fundamentals practised by Ben Graham and others (Warren Buffett is but one disciple) coming out of the post-1929 Crash may be worthwhile education and continuing professional development for him.

This confuses me.

Are you stating the obvious, that the pensioners will die out, or are you suggesting the liability can be mitigated and so, the pensioners will not be paid out as final salary levels?

My pension is funded by myself, at least until recently I thought it would be. My interest is academic in that I fail to understand how companies can continue to fund final salary pensions (nor how they dreamed they could and/or we accountants failed to spot the issue that perhaps they never could). However I also fail to see how they can mitigate the final salary pension liability.

So I return to you the question - "stating the obvious..... natural attrition?" or are you suggesting these are the most likely pension funds to fail - ahead of others?

Roger.