IT'S hard to think seriously about pensions when you're in your midtwenties. Old age seems a very long way away. So, like many other young women thirty odd years ago, I opted for the married woman's national insurance option.

After all, we young married women would eventually get a pension on our husband's contributions. Why waste what little money we earned on paying the full rate for something we wouldn't need?

It all looks rather different now. For a start, men currently have to wait five years longer than women for a state pension. Which means their wives have to wait too, unless they've a pension in their own right.

Some - like me - have a tiny weekly sum, which will go up when their husband gets to 65, though not by much.

It's a good thing young women are no longer able to opt out of the system.

But even those women who paid the full rate often found they lost out because they spent years as full-time carers for their children.

So I'm glad that in future women (or men) who work as unpaid carers, will be able to have those years counted towards their pension. lt's only fair. But tinkering with the edges of the system isn't enough. The pension system as it stands is a complicated mess.

Many people miss out even on what's due to them, either through ignorance, because they're too proud to apply for what looks to them like charity, or simply because they can't face answering all those questions or filling in all those forms. It must take hours of civil servants' time to calculate who's due what of all the diffferent topop benefits.

It's obvious reform is needed. But will it be the kind of sensible reform the Turner Report suggested? By the time this appears, the government will have published its White Paper on pensions.

What do I hope will be in it?

We probably have to accept a higher pension age. But once that age is reached, then everyone should get a decent weekly sum - enough to live comfortably if not extravagantly. It should be linked to earnings. If the pension was set at the same level as a generous basic tax threshold, then the moment any pensioner earned more than that, whether from employment or through an occupational pension, then they'd begin to pay income tax.

Wouldn't the simplicity - and cheapness - of administering such a sytem outweigh any increase in the total pension figure?

But for goodness sake, please don't let the private sector have any hand in administering the system! The state may not always be a model of efficiency, but those of us who've got dwindling private pension funds know how appalling the alternative can be.

And talking of efficiency, we're forever reading reports of the failure of some new IT system installed by the government. Passports get delayed, records lost, massive sums are paid in error to hard-up families - and then ruthlessly clawed back.

Don't all our hearts sink when a sparkling new computer system is announced? I have a simple question: Instead of all those special advisers with no special qualifications, why doesn't the government employ some real computer experts? Then when some saleman arrives trying to sell hisfirm's IT system, instead of being dazzled by all they're told it can do, they'll actually be able to assess it properly and get something that really does work.