The mooted pensions dashboard is badly needed to help people in the crucial task of finding lost retirement funds

The problem affects workers, mainly in the private sector, who have had multiple jobs.

Over that time they might have moved home many times, and even moved country more than once. The companies that they worked for might have folded long before.

A pensioner might not even know if they contributed to a fund in a job that they held decades previously, when they were too young to pay attention to such matters.

All paperwork could well be lost.

There is a proposal to reduce this confusion by bringing anyone person’s pension information all into a single place, a digital platform know as a ‘pensions dashboard’. Some years ago the government backed this proposal, but it is a major technological project and is not expected to be delivered this year.

Research by the consumer watchdog Which? has underlined the need for progress, because it found that most of a sample of people with various retirement pots were unable to get all the information they needed.

Tracing people for various reasons, ranging from telling them that they have got an inheritance to letting them know they have a forgotten bank account, has always been a tricky business. But in the internet age it ought to be far easier.

Pensioners with various small funds often paid into so-called defined contribution schemes, which are much less generous than defined benefit (DB), so-called final salary, schemes, and if so they already suffer from a pension apartheid.

For those who are not in DB schemes, it is all the more important that they can identify all of the often small sums of money to which have a real claim.

The government has helped people save for retirement by forcing them to do so via a relatively new process called auto enrolment, which has been a success. Now it can, and should, help them to find any buried past funds too.