"Even 40% tax relief looks a bad bargain"

Fine reader's letter in today's FT as follows:

"Sir,

Mary Francis (Letters, April 17) writes that pensions still have a lot to commend them, yet notes that a 60-year-old man with a 55-year-old wife will need a pot of £300,000 to have an index-linked annuity of £7,500 ... The only advantage pensions have over ordinary saving is tax relief. I would rather have £300,000 in the bank, an income of £15,000, and access to the capital and the opportunity for capital growth, thank you.

And if to get that income alone from an annuity I need a £600,000 pot, even 40 per cent tax relief begins to look like a bad bargain. Someone somewhere is making a lot of money from pensions, and it isn't the pensioner.

Simon Cockshutt"