@RazorSharp, pensions are not as dependable as they were before 1997 when Gordon Brown's first budget removed the dividend tax credit. When it existed, pension dividend income (whether personal or company) was received and reinvested without taxation to accrue until it was drawn as income by the pensioner. At one stroke, that went largely overlooked at the time, GB stopped pension funds building up funds that could smooth rises and falls between good and bad years.
After three or four years of this regime, companies found themselves falling behind in their contributions to employee pension schemes, so either having to put much more in to meet the promised defined benefit pension (where the pensioner gets a set % of their final salary for every year they work) and so these schemes closed to new employees who were put into defined contribution pensions, where what you ended up with was only your own and the employer contribution without reference to your final earnings level.
A few, but very high profile, large companies that had traditionally run their pensions with large surpluses started to take 'pension holidays' with the purpose of catching back the slack. And then, a few like Maxwell and his Mirror Group Newspapers, came unstuck and defaulted on their liabilities.
At about this time, to illustrate my story with personal anecdata, I was a freelance specialist writer on business, money and investment. I had not much pension: my last employer went spectacularly bust in 1990, but the receivers did a very good deal and my £16,000 went into an annuity fund which promised an 8% return on investment at age 60. Now I am 60, I get £350 per month until I die, from £16,000. You do the maths.
So knowing that would not keep pace with inflation, and that the state pension was a game of diminishing returns, I started to read about other methods of saving/investing long term money. Eventually, DH and I, with our newborn son named on the paperwork created a self-invested personal pension. We make the investment decisions, the scheme is administered by a specialist institutional trustee who oversees the legality of our investments, and the whole thing rolls up into a family pile which we can draw down as needed for income, or leave to accumulate, or buy new investments (not residential property, which is explicitly prohibited, but most other standard securities). We haven't put much into it in the last 20 years, but we bought a warehouse (with a mortgage) which has been let for 17 years and which has paid rent to the SIPP to pay off the mortgage. We've concentrated on our small business (and it is very small) but now we are on the edge of retirement/selling up, we have made decent contributions in the last year, which will be invested for another few years before we need the next wedge of income.
I have deliberately made this post as open and clear and factual as my professional experience writing about money permits, and I genuinely hope it is helpful and of interest to anyone in their late 30s and early 40s (as we were then) who hopes for a secure comfortable retirement. Because, if you rely on the word of salesmen or politicians to reassure you that all will be well as long as you believe their promises, you are well and truly zipped up and trussed for plucking.