Purchasing an annuity to provide an income in retirement is probably the most important financial decision an individual can ever make.

Get it right and it will maximise your income for the rest of your life; get it wrong and you could lose thousands of pounds over the course of your retirement.

Given the importance of the decision, the Government, the pension industry and regulators have a duty to do everything they can to make the decision as easy as possible but there is evidence the opposite is happening.

In the old days, people could rely on the certainties of a final-salary pension scheme, but now they are faced with making choices from an array of alternatives, some more regulated than others. In the words of Ros Altmann, the financial commentator, it is a Wild West world out there.

Partly, this is a result of the UK Government's own reforms. It made the right decision in moving millions of workers into workplace pensions, but it now appears the Financial Services Authority's retail distribution review, or RDR, which was supposed to clean up the industry, did not go far enough.

The review did make some important changes to ensure the advice on which pensioners increasingly have to rely is genuine and open. Advisers charge a fee instead of commission and investors must know up-front how much the advice is going to cost.

These changes were welcome, but a loophole remains. In allowing commission to continue for those products on which people do not receive advice, the reforms have allowed financial firms to continue as before in a large part of the market. They can advertise as "free" but charge commission which is not disclosed up front.

The consequences of this for pensioners can be serious, and in some cases could be the difference between a comfortable retirement and poverty. Clearly, some personal responsibility is needed here and, in an ideal world, every pensioner would carefully shop around and ask all the right questions before making their big decision.

However, it was the Government that said "you must have a pension" so it is the Government that must create the right environment to ensure people get the best one available. If it is indeed a Wild West out there, the Government must act as sheriff and impose some order.

This could mean further reform to ensure that even if pensioners do not shop around, they know in the clearest terms how much their annuity is going to cost. The purpose of the recent reforms was to ensure people could clearly understand the service they were being offered, and how much they were paying for it, and this should apply across the pensions market, with no exceptions.

The alternative is another scandal like the PPI affair. That crisis happened because customers were sold products on the basis of the commission that could be made rather than what was right for them. Exactly the same could happen in the pension market unless action is taken to make a complex risky market even more transparent and fair for everyone.