Pensions are under new oversight. In the past few months, the industry grandees asked to oversee more than £100 billion of UK workers’ savings have been named – but there is still substantial doubt over what their function will entail and, according to commentators, it remains to be seen how independent, and effective, they will be.

More than five million new savers have been brought into pension plans in the past three years in the UK, since the government's auto-enrolment policy began. With regulators keeping them on a tight leash, the UK's big life-insurance companies have launched a slew of new low-cost schemes to win a slice of the new market.