As one critic of these schemes wrote, ‘the only winners in equity release are the companies and elderly people who die just a few years after taking out the policy.

I still love the music and it's still plays a part in what I do but I never 'turned my back' on garage. I was always doing R&B with, say, Walking Away. It's wonderful that I was classed as the king of 2-step and a pioneer, but it's had its turn, I think.

There was a lack of traveling, but the people who were traveling were in family groups. There was a feeling that families had to be together. We even got our family together that night,

Another hidden danger with ‘switch and get rich’ is that older pensions might have guaranteed bonuses or annuity rate guarantees hidden away in the small print. Many of these will date from the 1980s and 1990s when interest rates were higher and stock-market performance was much better than it is today and will be for at least the next five to ten years. Most savers probably don’t know about these guarantees and may be lured into switching from older, better funds and thus losing valuable benefits.

People who are retiring now are finding that annuity rates have been squashed by QE, and that they will get a smaller pension than they expected. Retirees who get locked into a weak annuity will find that the Bank’s money printing leaves them out of pocket for the rest of their lives.134

Another commented, ‘QE is a key ingredient in a recipe that is destroying the value of the UK’s retirement savings. It’s a torture for pension funds because it artificially suppresses long-term interest rates’.138