We only need to look at what happened with pension freedoms, when many people who were genuinely trying to make the right decision, and had no knowledge of where to get the right kind of information, let alone advice, ended up putting their money into bad investments.
With the lifetime provider model, this must be talking about the entire working population who are moving jobs, not just those coming up to retirement, who, one would hope, have had a bit more life experience under their belt.
The financial services industry is simply not geared up for this kind of mass exercise, although the Financial Conduct Authority is attempting to devise some kind of targeted support and simplified advice that could involve providers and financial advisers.
To make such a restructuring exercise work, it would need a huge ramping up of the availability of sensible information and advice, at a cost that would work, and some way of clamping down the poor and fraudulent advertising that crops up the whole time on social media and on banner adverts.
It would also need an extremely well thought through plan for regulating such a new environment.
The Department for Work and Pensions has acknowledged some of these issues, saying in its consultation paper ("Looking to the future: greater member security and rebalancing risk"): "We suggest a move to a lifetime provider model should have defaults built into it, to continue to build on the power [of] inertia."
Still, there is deep reluctance in many quarters about pressing ahead with such a plan. Many in the pension industry are fearful for the above reasons, and also because they think it would actually undermine the relationship between the employee and employer, which many see as the key to the success of AE.
Even FCA chief executive, Nikhil Rathi, possibly mindful of his Treasury bosses, said in a recent speech: "The pension pot for life would need a clear delivery road map stretching over a decade. And once that map has been agreed, we will need a period of stability to focus on execution."
Regardless, the department is holding many discussions with those involved in Australian Superannuation, the DC scheme launched 30 years ago, now bigger than the Australian economy, to see how they did it.
The problem is that trying to transplant another country's pension system onto our own as it stands is going to be fraught with problems, given that Australia built their DC pension system from scratch, whereas the UK already has nearly 27,000 trust-based schemes.
However much the lure of the Australian model, and its A$3.2tn (£1.6tn) of assets and however many infrastructure assets it owns, UK policymakers, general election notwithstanding, must proceed with caution to prevent a huge unravelling of UK workplace pensions, which took so much trouble to achieve.
