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This article was first published in the May 2016 UK edition of Accounting and Business magazine.

Any company will tell you that transitions are difficult. In a project to cut legacy costs, management will set out the savings to be achieved in, say, three years’ time and how much it will cost to get there. The hard part is executing the plan.

Multiply that by 10 and you have the challenge facing government of tackling the cost of an ageing population. The UK has embarked on reforms to both the state pension and private saving that will take a generation to play out, coinciding with the bulge in retiring baby boomers.

Meanwhile, there is much noise – most recently on the rise in women’s state pension age to 65 and the new ‘single-tier’ pension, running alongside various legacy tiers. These are classic transition problems. Increasing the state pension age not only makes sense but should be accelerated. Yet how rational will the recently launched review, led by John Cridland, be allowed to be?

The rationale for the single-tier pension is to lift pensioners off means-tested income support – hence the £155.65 weekly rate – and provide a platform on which private savings can be built. During the transition there will be winners and losers among new retirees. By the 2040s, though, the swings and roundabouts will actually move in the Exchequer’s favour.

These changes alone are a big deal. Add to them the thorny issue of tax relief for private pension saving, with most benefits going to higher-rate taxpayers, and the scene is set for much more noise. A Treasury consultation paper – Strengthening the incentive to save: a consultation on pensions tax relief – created the expectation that big changes would be announced in the March Budget, especially as the chancellor is trying to eliminate the fiscal deficit. In the event, the under-40s will have a new incentive to save via a Lifetime ISA (with the forecast cost easily outweighed by savings in public sector pensions).

This is small change, however. Much more significant are the annual savings already in train. These include £6bn a year from cutting tax-free allowances for annual pension contributions and lifetime fund size; £5.5bn from ending the contracting-out of some national insurance contributions (NICs) by defined benefit schemes; and £5bn from raising the state pension age for all to 66 by 2020.

A couple more billion will be saved as the benefits paid to pensioners come down. And, by the way, the number of pensioners paying income tax has risen from 4.9 million to 5.75 million since 2010/11. In 2014/15 they paid £13bn tax on their private pensions.

So, even without restricting tax relief on pension contributions to 20% or removing the employers’ exemption from NICs, a big dent will be made in the £48bn of income tax and NICs forgone in 2014/15 – this gives time for changes to be thought through, alongside work to better align the two levies.

At the state spending level, the review of the state pension age should kill off the unsustainable policy principle that we can expect to spend a third of our adult life receiving a state pension. Instead of the ‘triple lock’ promise of perennial state pension rises, a target should be set for the single-tier payment, such as 60% of the national living wage.

All these moving parts would benefit from a drive towards simplification, as has started with the Byzantine NICs regime. Pensioner-specific benefits, such as the winter fuel allowance, should be phased out. But no matter how sensible the proposals, there is no antidote to the transitional noise.

Jane Fuller is a fellow of CFA UK and pensions fellow at the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation