THE mutual admiration society is not the fan club it was, thanks to Equitable Life. Now mutuality, once an almost revered concept, in which an institution is owned by its customers, is taking yet another knock. Standard Life, the insurer which once used the benefits of mutuality as its principal sales pitch, this week cut its 2004 bonuses. The business will shed its mutual status in a stock market flotation next year.

But Standard Life will continue to stand as proof that mutuality can mean a lack of accountability. In the absence of pernickety City investors, bad management decisions can go unchallenged.

The company’s 2.6 million with-profits pensions and endowment holders should be aware that the depth of the bonus cuts can be attributed, in part, to one of Standard Life’s bigger blunders. This was to stay in shares when markets were falling in 2000; more switched-on rivals were swapping some of their portfolios into bonds.

At the time, a director of one of these rivals expressed to me his dismay over Standard Life’s strategy, with its “colossal loss in value” for customers. He made other criticisms of the management, but I deemed them too strong for public consumption. Sandy Crombie, Standard Life’s current chief executive, was not included in these censures, but he now has his own detractors, including Mike Hogan, a policyholder fighting for a place on the board.

Despite the cuts, Standard Life’s payouts are competitive with those of other with-profits insurers (which is not saying much). But mutuality was supposed to mean that Standard Life would be the star, By contrast with these goings-on, building societies tend to show that mutuality works, with better-value products and an upfront attitude. Nationwide usually exemplifies the latter, but not always. On January 21, the society told us that it would not be charging penalties to borrowers redeeming their mortgages early. On the same day, one Times reader learnt that this was the society’s new policy. Nationwide likes to occupy the moral high ground, but telling a newspaper one thing and your customers another is the start of a slippery slope.

NEXT year, half of the country’s cash machines will probably charge you a fee of between £1 and £5 to withdraw your own money. The bosses of the big banks, summoned before the Commons Treasury Select Committee this week, may have hoped to dissociate themselves from this alarming trend. But the banks and other members of Link, the automated teller network, have other links besides affiliation to this organisation.

No bank levies charges for the use of its machines. But Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which owns NatWest, also owns Hanco, a group that operates 6,000 fee-charging machines in shops and clubs. The establishment receives some of the fee (which is £10 in the case of one swinging London hot spot) but RBS takes a cut. Last year, HBOS, the Halifax and Bank of Scotland group, sold 800 machines to Cardpoint, another fee-charging operator. But HBOS has not ended the relationship entirely, as it is earning interest from the loan it gave Cardpoint to fund the £50 million purchase.

If you live in rural or some inner-city areas where RBS and HBOS and the rest have closed branches, you have little choice but to use a fee-charging machine.

As I have mentioned previously, before Tesco Express arrived with a free ATM, the inhabitants of my part of West London were forced to rely on machines in convenience stores, where you sometimes pay £2 for a withdrawal. I like to walk the 10,000 steps a day you need to stay healthy, but on dark cold evenings, my determination not to pay to gain access to my own funds tends to waver.

The idea that the bank that abandoned your neighbourhood continues to benefit from each of your withdrawals will increase your anger at being forced to pay a fee. The least that these banks and the others can do is to support moves to ensure that all fee-charging machines declare this fact in large letters where a sign can easily be seen. A sticker at knee height, an increasingly popular practice, is simply not acceptable.

GEORGE BUSH’S State of the Union address underlined his wish to reform the pension system, lessening dependency on the State, with workers diverting some of their taxes into personal investment accounts.

But before it draws up its plans, the US Administration should study the (lack of) progress Britain has made along a similar route. The stakeholder pension — modelled, ironically, on the 401K, a type of US retirement plan — is not serving to diminish reliance on the public purse.

Meanwhile, new research shows that those few employees investing in stakeholders could be disappointed. As we report on page 18, many are choosing the scheme’s “default option”, where money goes into an insurer’s cautious managed fund. As a result, the returns may be mediocre.

There is nothing wrong with making people more responsible for their financial futures. But in the absence of a proper programme of financial education, they may mess up and be forced to fall back on the State. All political parties should realise such education is necessary for any improvement in the nation’s level of pension provision.