The Office of Fair Trading's report into the workplace pensions market published this morning does not pull any punches, and if you only take one sentence from it, this is the one: "The buyer side of the DC workplace pensions market is one of the weakest that the OFT has analysed in recent years."

From there, all other problems flow. It is time to relegate everything else - "rip-off fees", sleepy trustees and self-serving providers, all the caricatures and specifics - to their proper importance. They are all symptoms, rather than the underlying cause of market failure.