THE architects of the Great Pensions' Crisis are not the hapless millions now being told they have not been saving enough, but recent governments entrusted with securing a decent standard of living for the nation's citizens at the end of their working lives.

Under Margaret Thatcher, the Tories broke the state pension's link with earnings. Bang went the best and most valued "benefit' ever created. Then, New Labour's chancellor Gordon Brown chose to tax (ie plunder) company pension schemes. Bang went the chief private sector provision, once even a tool for recruitment, as firms vied with each other over the quality of their schemes.

That's history. Belatedly has come recognition that the state pension must be significantly improved and upheld at all costs. But coupled with that is the near-certainty that people must work longer - noses to the grindstone until 70. Hailed as a landmark, the report spelling out this dismaying prospect confines itself exclusively to matters financial. Completely absent - indeed missing from the entire Pensions' Crisis debate - are many wider social implications.

Who will do the child-minding now performed by millions of pensioner-grandparents? Seventy is not a good age at which to embark on the care of quicksilver children, who demand eternal vigilance.

Who will run the many voluntary community organisations now dependent on retired people? Of course the official answer is that longer-lived pensioners will simply take up at 70 what today's pensioners do at 65 or less.

Who believes that? The extra years of work will have taken their toll. And with a greater sense of time running out, the retired might be less willing to serve others or the community.

Even the financial calculations of the new report fail to take account of the huge black hole that will open up with the virtual removal from the market place of the high-spending Saga generation - the legions of relatively young active pensioners whose leisure pursuits, from gardening to globe-trotting, generate work and wealth. The implications of retirement at 70 for the National Trust, our leading conservation body, are colossal, with fewer visits and a drying-up in the recruitment of stewards bound to bring the curtailment of opening at many properties.

Against the grain of modern thought, I believe that earlier, rather than later, retirement should be the aim. One reason lies in the workplace itself, where greater retention of older employees seems bound to restrict the vital flow of new blood. But for those who work diligently, 30-35 years of putting one's back into it seems sufficient to me.

Besides, many who retire early today continue to work, part-time, at their own pace and without the daily pressures. I myself have been in this happy position since I retired at 55, 11 years ago.

Without doubt these have been golden years, which I would wish for everyone. But within the last month two people of my age whom I knew have died. One retired, one still working, they were both still some distance off the finishing post for work that our masters look set to impose. The Great Pensions' Crisis might be averted, but the human cost will be huge, and in its wake will come other crises, already perfectly visible but not properly perceived.