With a share in the responsibility for the financial well-being of tens of thousands of people, Mark Ashworth is a great believer in staying focused. “If you think about it too much, you might not do anything,” he says. “So you focus on the tasks at hand, make sure you do them well, and try not to be overwhelmed.”

As head of the professional pensions trusteeship division of Law Debenture, one of the UK's oldest independent trustee firms, he sits on the board of some of the UK's biggest pension funds - among others, two schemes of the Lloyds TSB Group, worth about £15bn, the Royal Mail Pension Plan, worth about £26bn, and the Sainsbury pension scheme, worth about £4bn.