Good news for the pension industry? Well possibly. PricewaterhouseCoopers believes that Britain's large employers will offer more generous schemes than the bare minimums set out in the government's big new solution to the pensions crisis, which formally began its progress into law yesterday.

Peter Woods, a pensions partner at the firm, reckons the UK's larger firms are not likely to "level down" to the new minimum standards the government is setting. Hopefully he should know, as PwC is one of the country's bigger corporate advisers on pensions.