It is now 10 years to the month since Andrew Smith, Labour’s then-secretary of state for work and pensions, first formally recommended the creation of a Pension Protection Fund to rescue the employee savings of bankrupt companies.

Today, the PPF is a £12bn giant with 176,000 members - and by 2016 it expects to be almost twice that size, serving half a million. Its cutting-edge liability management techniques have won it Financial News' pensions award for Best Investment Strategy two years in a row. In its last financial year, it reported returns of more than 25%.