Still, there are just a few compensations. One is that you have experiences that younger colleagues and contacts haven’t. Sometimes these can come in very handy indeed.

I realised this forcefully recently at an industry session where new approaches to surplus were debated. We discussed how trustees should approach investment risk in a world of surplus, how to set investment strategy and what trustees should accept on members’ behalves if the employer wants to benefit from emerging surplus.

There is an intellectual recognition that this is a return to the discussions of the 80s and 90s, when surpluses were last common. But it struck me that the psychological aspect of this has not been fully grasped, because few now in pensions actually lived through it the last time.

For decades, employers have seen their pension schemes as a costly overhead. Worse, a money pit. Generations of bright-eyed FDs have slouched away wearily, worn down by interminable actuarial discussions they had never signed up for. The pension scheme was a toxic legacy, a nuclear power plant to be decommissioned, a millstone.

And now? Suddenly, some employers are once again considering the pension scheme as an asset. It may be a source of direct contribution to the company’s funding. Or it may be used to meet employer contributions to a DC section. One way or another, it has become something to be valued.

This is a simple point and an important one. Such employers will regard their pension scheme with warmth. Trustees used to an iciness from the boardroom will find this unfamiliar. They may not always find this new warmth more comfortable.

The last time that employers saw pension schemes as an asset was in the late 1990s. Up to that time, it had been a central assumption for two decades.

Some buccaneering entrepreneurs sought to take full advantage. Takeover bids were launched in the 1980s on the basis that the target’s pension scheme surplus could be used to fund the bid. One parent company tried to substitute itself as principal employer of the pension schemes of companies it was selling to snaffle the surplus. The courts were having none of it.

In the early 90s, employers used pension scheme surpluses to fund their redundancy programmes through generous early retirement terms. The costs of these were humongous. These programmes felt free to employers (in the early 90s at least).

Even disruptions like the unexpected requirement to equalise benefits were seen more as a botheration rather than a concern about cost.

The reckoning came later. Quietly, schemes slipped into buy-out deficit in c1996. No one noticed, owing to the very different way in which pension schemes were valued at that time. Employers and trustees alike continued to act as if schemes were in buoyant surpluses right the way up to the turn of the millennium. Then, with a stock market slump, reality hit.

Investment and funding strategies are much more structured now than they were then. Still, trustees need to keep an eye on realities. Employers will be keen to keep using pension schemes as a resource for as long as they can. Trustees need to avoid the mistakes of the late 1990s and ensure that the psychology keeps pace with the underlying facts. Because while there’s almost no problem that can’t be solved with money, the problems really start mounting when there isn’t enough of the darned stuff.

Alastair Meeks, Director of Client Services – ZEDRA