The union body said a combination of low pay and part-time work meant many women were unable to build up a sufficient company pension.

In addition, many women miss out on a full state pension due to time spent away from work to look after children.

Firms should have to to their workers’ pensions and state pension contribution rules be relaxed to help women, the TUC said.

Precarious

Our pensions system was not designed with women in mind Brendan Barber, TUC

More women than ever are in the workforce but almost half of them are in part-time employment.

Many part-time jobs do not bring access to a company pension scheme.

The TUC calculated that only 15% of unskilled women in part-time jobs are members of a company pension scheme.

“Our pensions system was not designed with women in mind,” said TUC general Brendan Barber.

“It is out of date and condemns many millions of women to an uncertain and precarious retirement.”

Mr Barber urged the to help plug the gap in female pension provision.

Employers should be made to contribute to their employees’ pensions and rules stopping women with less than 10 years National Insurance contributions from collecting state pension should be abolished, Mr Barber said.

In the first of a two-part Money Programme special, reporter Michael Robinson reveals what’s gone wrong with Britain’s once world-renowned pension system.

Trevor Matthews, chief executive of pensions at Standard Life, is one of those concerned about what the future holds.

“The prospect is that this generation is not going to enjoy the dignity in that they deserve, they are not going to enjoy a good quality of life in retirement, they’re going to be worrying about every pound they spend,” he said.

At 79.60 a week, Britain’s state pension is one of the lowest in the developed world. For many people, it is just too low to live on, especially if you don’t even get the full amount.

Rosemarie Brierley, who is 67, gets just 50.22 a week from the state, so despite reaching retirement age, she has to keep on working to make ends meet.

She doesn’t qualify for the full basic state pension of 79.60 because she took time out of the workplace to bring up a family.

To qualify for the full amount, women need to pay National Insurance contributions for 39 years, men for 44 years.

Half of British women don’t qualify for the full basic state pension and Rosemarie thinks this is wrong.

“I worked as hard as any man in this country but differently, I think it’s a scandal, it’s worse than a scandal it’s disgraceful,” she said.

‘Disgrace’

In 1999, the New Labour government brought in a system of a means tested top-up to the basic state pension, aimed at helping people like Rosemarie who don’t get enough to live on.

Los Albertos’ band members are living for the moment

This can take the basic state pension up to 105 a week for a single person.

But if you have private savings, or income from a private pension, you may not qualify for this and that is problem.

She has a small nest egg of 35,000 which she has put away for a rainy day.

This means she doesn’t qualify for much of the top up - only a few pounds a week, and she regrets saving.

“I did save, but it hasn’t done me a bit of good. If I hadn’t saved I’d now have a 105 pounds a week instead of 50.22 a week.”

Difficult choice

One possible fix for the problems can be found on the other side of the world, in New Zealand, where everybody gets a flat rate state pension, based on residence, not contributions and with no means testing.

Tim Herman is not saving for his retirement

But even if all the problems with the state pension system are resolved, there are still a host of pitfalls in the world of private pensions.

The whole system is incredibly . Martin Andrews and his girlfriend Sarah Draper are about to get married and are thinking about getting a pension together in the future, but Sarah doesn’t know where to begin.

“I can’t begin to imagine what kind of pension to choose for the future and what money I’ll need,” she said.

“The not all that clear on it, so how the hell should we know?”

And when they do manage to decide, they’re faced with a whole range of obstacles to getting a good pension at the end of it.

Tough

Charges levied on pension funds by providers over a 30 year period can have a dramatic effect on the size of an individual’s savings.

Pensions expert Dr Ros Altmann has concerns about it.

The charging structure of private pensions is one of the biggest problems that we have to deal with, because you will lose a huge proportion of your capital over the longer term. You can lose up to a third of your capital over 30 years.

Dr Altmann and Mr Robinson bring shocking news

So to encourage us to save more into pension funds, the government spends billions of pounds a year through tax relief.

But most of this ends up the richest in the land, while offering only modest encouragement to the majority of us who need to save the most.

But the toughest thing of all for pension savers is knowing just how much to put away to get a decent pension.

“If you want 10,000 every year, you will need to save around 200,000,” said Ms Altmann.

“So if you want a 20,000 a year pension, somehow from your savings you’ve got to get an amount of about 400,000.”

Not easy for the vast majority of us. So this leaves a stark choice.

We can either rely on a low state pension in retirement, try to stretch to saving several hundred pounds a month into a personal pension or face working long into retirement to deliver an extra income.

Pensions Panic: Any Way Out? will be broadcast on BBC Two on Friday 11 March at 1900.

It will cut 230 jobs in Coventry and 50 in Shrewsbury, as “a direct consequence of the probable demise of MG Rover”.

A task force set up to help suppliers of MG Rover made payouts of 63,000 to six suppliers earlier on Thursday, saving 234 staff from redundancy.

There was more bad news for Rover on Thursday after its cars did badly in a league table of driver satisfaction.

Rover was ranked 28th out of 32 car in a survey of 20,000 car owners carried out by market information company JD Power and What Car? magazine.

Only Land Rover, Peugeot, Fiat and Alfa Romeo came below Rover. Top of the table were Lexus, Skoda and Honda.

Staying alive

Stadco made the body for the MG TF and body panels for the Rover 25, 45 and 75. It employs just under 1,500 people in the UK, 450 of which are based in Coventry.

The firm said it had started the consultation process involved in making 280 staff redundant.

The government has said a total of 40m in grants would be made available to support businesses who supplied Rover.

We know of firms where 85% of their business is supplying Rover… it’s hard for them to see a future John Edwards, chief executive of Advantage West Midlands Rover user satisfaction low

But John Edwards, a member of the task force and chief executive of Advantage West Midlands, said that helping companies which are heavily dependent on Rover for most of their work could be more difficult than helping those which are more diversified.

“We have to target those companies, which with some support, can survive,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“We know of firms where 85% of their business is supplying Rover. In these , it is hard for them to see a future for themselves.

“We are talking to government about (the of) deferring VAT and National Insurance payments… but it is very difficult.”

Moving forward

CRUELLEST MONTH April 2: Government offers 100m bridging loan if SAIC does deal April 4: Talks with SAIC stall April 7: Government says Rover in administration April 8: Rover goes into administration April 10: Government offers 6.5m to keep Rover going for a week April 12: “Phoenix Four” pledge 49m April 13: Rover task force’s first payout

According to Advantage West Midlands, some of the 40m available for grants could be used to assist residents near Longbridge who are affected by the problems there - for example, shops that serve Rover workers.

Separately, The Times newspaper reported that the government has set aside 25m to keep MG Rover afloat if Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC) resumes talks about investing in the car firm.

The extra government funds could keep the troubled car firm going until the election on 5 May, the newspaper said. The government has already offered a 6.5m loan to keep Rover going this week.

The DTI said that talk of a further 25m was “pure speculation.” But it added that it would be meeting later this week to consider future funding .

PricewaterhouseCoopers, the administrator for MG Rover, is said to want to put forward a new plan to SAIC, but doubts remain over how enthusiastic the Chinese firm will be to revive the deal.

The Paxman Interviews do exactly what the title says.

There are no audiences, no phone-ins, no sofa, no young Ant and Dec. Just Jeremy Paxman doing what he does best with each of the party leaders in turn, in three Newsnight specials.

The half-hour interviews will run at 1930 BST on BBC One, with another chance to see the best bits on Newsnight in its normal slot on BBC Two at 2230 BST.

Searching

First up on Monday, 18 April is the Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy.

With a new baby less than a week old and a manifesto launch he would rather forget, Mr Kennedy needs a outing to get his campaign back on track.

The Prime Minister Tony Blair follows on Wednesday, 20 April.

In the corresponding fixture ahead of the last general election the prime minister famously told Paxman that voters should not assume that National Insurance would go up if Labour won.

They did, and we expect Paxman will want to know why.

Last, but possibly most of all, will be the interview with the Conservative leader Michael Howard on Friday, 22 April.

Jeremy Paxman’s 1997 encounter with Mr Howard, then a candidate in the Tory contest, was easily voted the viewers’ favourite moment in 25 years of Newsnight earlier this year.

We do not need to explain why. What will happen this time?

The Paxman Interviews will be broadcast on Monday 18, Wednesday 20 and Friday 22 April 2005 at 1930 BST on BBC One.

You can also watch the interviews live and on demand from the BBC News Website.

It was the right decision to have taken and he was unapologetic for it, yet he did not disrespect those who believed they had been misled, he said.

It is an answer he has rehearsed time and again and is not about to re-write in the second half of the general election campaign.

Similarly, he was not about to confess to having misled voters about his on taxation at the last election.

Extra spending

Four years ago, in a similar interview, he had rejected Mr Paxman’s suggestion that it was clear from all he had said that he would raise National Insurance contributions if he was .

There is another well-rehearsed answer to this one - he was only led to increase NICs after a report indicated such levels of extra spending were necessary for the health service.

Mr Paxman revived concerns over the war

So couldn’t he do the same again, if he wins a third time, when, for example, the Turner report into the pensions black hole is delivered.

He was not about to be drawn into mapping out budgets at this point, he declared.

And there was more but, it has to be said, despite some persistent probing, there was nothing particularly surprising in the answers.

And the prime minister may well feel he emerged with few bruises from the encounter with one of the toughest boys on the block.

He told BBC Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman people had to make their own judgement but he took the decision he had to.

“If you want me to apologise for the war in Iraq, I’m afraid I cannot say that I’m sorry we removed Saddam Hussein,” the Labour leader said.

During a 30-minute grilling he also said he did not know how many failed asylum seekers there were in the UK.

Despite repeated , he declined to give an estimate.

Proper controls

He said the government’s measures on asylum meant the numbers applying were falling, the backlog of cases was lower and more failed asylum seekers were being removed.

“For the very reason that the previous government gave, you cannot determine how many people are here illegally,” he said.

“The only long term way of dealing with this issue, however, is to introduce proper controls at borders through an electronic visa regime and identity cards.”

I had to take the decision as prime minister that I thought was right for the country and I did so Tony Blair Blair defends his record Newsnight interview

He rejected the Tory proposal to set an upper limit on economic migrants as having the potential to cause “tremendous damage” to the economy by denying businesses the workers they needed.

Pressed over the government’s use of in the build-up to the war, Mr Blair insisted the government had been vindicated by four separate inquiries.

He said going to war in Iraq had been a “hard decision” taken for the right reasons.

“You can go through these issues about my integrity, my character, the legal advice… or you can accept that in the end a decision had to be taken.

‘Great partnership’

“There was no middle way, there was no fence to sit on. I took that decision.

“Now I know people strongly disagreed with it. I’m sorry. In the end I had to take the decision as prime minister that I thought was right for the country and I did so.”

Asked if he would replace Britain’s ageing nuclear deterrent, Mr Blair said he believed it was needed by the country, but said it was a decision for the future.

Tony Blair denied having made a deal with Chancellor Gordon Brown

Questioned on whether Labour would raise taxes, he said the party’s spending proposals “are catered for by the tax plans that we’ve got”.

Mr Blair defended the 1% rise in National Insurance during the previous Parliament as necessary for investment in the NHS.

He did not agree with the local income tax proposed by the Lib Dems but did feel council tax should be reformed, he said.

Mr Blair denied having made a deal with Chancellor Gordon Brown to stand down after the election but stressed that they had a “great partnership”.

He restated his intention to serve a full third term if re-elected, saying the job of prime minister was still full of challenges.

“I still think we’ve got things to do. The irony of this job is you are less popular as time goes on but in some ways better equipped to do the job,” he said.

“There’s masses for me to do and that’s what gets you up in the morning.”

*Tony Blair will appear on The Paxman Interviews on Wednesday at 1930 BST on BBC One. You can also watch the interviews live by clicking on the election news in video button at the top of all BBC News website election stories.