Suddenly, the planks of government pension policy are shifting. After three years of denying that the strategy is creating barriers to saving - chiefly through the pension credit, which is leading to greater reliance on means-testing - the government is acknowledging that its critics have a point.

Downing Street, which, since Labour's first big drive on pension reform in 1998, has been disengaged from pension policy, is focusing on the subject again. In his conference speech, the prime minister announced that in a third term Labour would redesign the state system, putting more money into pensions while ensuring that the non-means-tested basic pension was "at the core" of the redesign.