“YOU GET to 55 and you are on your own. I wish I had thought harder about that in 2010.”

This honest view was recently given by Michael Johnson, a research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies, who was instrumental in the design of the pension freedoms and choice reforms.

The context was the unintended consequences of the radical reforms, not least that many more individuals now bear longevity risk because of the removal of the annuitisation requirement.

The view that there is no support available when pension savers come to access their benefits might be contested by the Government, which has acknowledged that it has a role to play in ensuring people can access the financial guidance they need to help make informed decisions on financial matters.

In fact, the Government has consulted three times since October 2015 on whether, and how, to improve the provision of public financial guidance.

The headline result of the various consultations will see the Money Advice Service, the Pensions Advisory Service and Pension Wise, which was itself introduced as recently as April 2015, replaced by a new single financial guidance body.

It is hard to argue with the general motivation behind this move - by removing duplication and reducing overheads the new model will allow more funding to be channelled to the front line.

The move should not be viewed in isolation either, as it is just one of a package of wider reforms, including the Financial Advice Market Review.

But given the radical nature of the pension freedoms and choice reforms, which removed the default mechanisms designed to ensure pension savings lasted a lifetime, not to mention the effects of the current economic environment, is the financial guidance shake-up up to the challenge?

If history is to be repeated, failure looks likely.

Consider the first three months of the pension freedoms regime. The Financial Conduct Authority undertook a data-collection exercise that found 204,581 pension policies had been accessed, representing an increase of around 215 per cent compared to the same period in 2013.

During that timeframe Pension Wise reported having just 13,019 face-to-face or telephone interactions. That is not an inspiring return for a £35 million budget and is clear evidence that only a fraction of consumers were using the guidance service before accessing their pension funds.

Separately, an independent review of the Money Advice Service reported it had invested over £100m developing and promoting its website, with over 99 per cent of its consumer contact coming via the web.

At the time of the report, which was released in December 2014, the Money Advice Service expected 20 million contacts to its website that year, while a like for like figure from moneysavingexpert was 120 million.

So previous attempts at guidance services appear not to have engaged the masses and, ultimately, value for money has been questionable. A brand change would not appear the answer to materially addressing these shortcomings.

More importantly, while guidance may offer a good starting point, for most it will be exactly that – the start rather than the end of the process. The complexities involved in managing pension savings will require personal advice rather than generic guidance for the clear majority of individuals.

Take drawdown as an example. Would the average pension saver have confidence in selecting a safe withdrawal rate intended to last a lifetime, assuming drawdown is suitable for the individual in the first place? Would they be equally confident matching this with a suitable asset allocation strategy?

Needless to say, it would appear to be an extremely remote possibility that a guidance appointment lasting between 45 to 60 minutes is suddenly going to be able to bridge this capability gap. At best, it will provide some generic guidance, but will leave a big gap between that and advice tailored to individual circumstances.

If, as seems likely, history does indeed repeat itself and we again find ourselves reevaluating how we best help people make informed decisions on their financial matters I would hope we think harder about tackling the issue head on. Specifically, there should be a move towards putting forward advice rather than guidance solutions, whether that be through promotion, incentivisation or compulsion.

Lee Halpin, is technical manager at @sipp.