Gordon Brown's tax raid on pension funds has snatched £17,000 from every worker's retirement pot, research says today.

Yet the value of public sector schemes - funded by taxpayers - has soared to an astonishing £1trillion.

Opposition MPs, business chiefs and campaigners demanded an investigation into the growing 'pensions apartheid'.

The report, The UK Pensions Crisis, is the work of the TaxPayers' Alliance and Terry Arthur, a fellow of the Institute of Actuaries.

It says Mr Brown's decision in 1997, when he was Chancellor, to axe tax relief on dividends paid to pension funds has cost private occupational schemes £175billion.

This amounts to £16,600 for each of the 10.5million retirement pots of current workers. If the pensions being paid to retired staff are taken into account, it is still an average deficit of £6,000.

Mr Brown's decision forced companies to make up massive shortfalls and began the decline of final salary schemes.

The number of members of private sector schemes has fallen from 6.1million in 1995 to 3.6million last year. At that rate, says the report, there will be no paying-in members of occupational schemes within 12 years.

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