Eleven days ago, sitting in his fourth floor office in the Adelphi, in London’s West End, Adair Turner signed off his long-awaited report on pensions. It had been a mammoth exercise, taking three years since his appointment by Tony Blair to head a special Pensions Commission.

From the start he knew the biggest threat to the project was Gordon Brown. There had been friction between 10 and 11 Downing Street over his appointment. The chancellor, who likes to maintain an iron grip on the domestic agenda, baulked at an outsider invading his territory.

As with the commission’s 318-page interim report, published in October last year, the document due to be published this Wednesday was written by Turner from start to finish.

His role was to steer the government through a tricky political maze. People are living longer in retirement and longevity is set to increase further, but the country is not saving enough and there is a looming £57 billion annual “black hole” in the amount being set aside for retirement. Turner’s task was to come up with a solution and to provide the government with cover.

Each time Blair has been asked about pensions over the past three years he has insisted he can say nothing ahead of the report. As Turner and his staff sent the report off to the printers on November 16, he knew he would be challenging some sacred cows. “There are going to be no easy choices,” he said.

His proposals are expected to include a rise in the state pension age from 65 to 67 over the next 25 years, with further increases to occur in line with increasing longevity — roughly a year every decade. In return, the state pension would be raised by £30 from the present single person’s £82 a week and linked to earnings, a link broken by Margaret Thatcher a quarter of a century ago.

Turner is also expected to propose a “Britsaver” plan, loosely based on New Zealand’s “KiwiSaver” scheme, aimed at the 9m people who save too little for retirement. Everybody would be signed up to the scheme and pay 4% of their wages into it, with employers paying a further 3% and the government 1%. Only those already in good pension schemes could opt out.

The day after the report was sent for printing, staff at the Pensions Commission had bundles of page proofs delivered to the Treasury, Downing Street and the work and pensions department. That, with hindsight, was Turner’s mistake.

Brown was in the middle of a series of overseas trips, but he and his advisers made sure that, when Turner’s report landed, the Treasury’s experts went through it with a fine tooth comb.

The chancellor had intended to use their analysis to challenge Turner’s recommendations once the report was published, in particular the proposal for a more generous state pension linked to earnings. But events and a Whitehall leak conspired to cast him in the role of saboteur.

THE first Brown knew about it was when he was taking tea with Lionel Barber, the new editor of the Financial Times, in Downing Street on Wednesday. Barber dropped into the conversation that the FT had a leak of a letter from Brown to Turner.

It went to the heart of the assumptions on which Turner’s report was based. The leaked letter warned Turner that “you should not assume” that the current link between earnings and the pension credit (introduced by Brown to help poorer pensioners) “will continue beyond 2008”.

Without that assumption, according to the Treasury, Turner’s proposals for a more generous state pension did not stack up financially.

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