THE businessman appointed by Tony Blair to review the private pensions system attacked the Government’s pension statistics yesterday for being “inadequate”.

The criticism came as the Inland Revenue admitted that it had overstated the amount of pensions tax relief it paid by £3 billion a year since 1999.

Adair Turner, the respected former business consultant, said that his review, expected in the summer but now due on October 12, had been delayed by the paucity of government information on pensions. He added that his review was made even more difficult because the Government Actuary’s Department had tended to be over-optimistic in its mortality predictions.

Mr Turner said that he had spent five months at the ONS, trying to find data sufficiently accurate to use in his review. “It’s been a major issue,” he said. “We’d not anticipated the severity of the problem or how long it would take to get to the bottom of it.”

Mr Turner said the ONS’s pension statistics were “very significantly wrong; £12 billion is not a trivial amount”.

The ONS recently cut by £12 billion its estimate of how much money Britons put aside in pensions savings in 2002.

The faulty figures are behind the exaggeration by the Revenue of the amount of tax relief it gave to people with private pensions. From 1999, every time someone moved their savings from one pension provider to another, the ONS counted the money as new pension savings, thus counting the money twice. The error was revealed by David Willetts, Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, in The Times two years ago.

In December 2002 the Government established the Pensions Commission, chaired by Mr Turner, to look into the state of private pensions and long-term savings in Britain.

The commission, charged with making recommendations on the future of the pensions system, will release its interim report next month before issuing its final conclusions after the next election.

Mr Turner said that government actuaries had to face the fact that, contrary to their assumptions, improvements in life expectancy were unlikely to tail off. He said: “For the last 20 years, most actuarial forecasts have tended to underestimate what subsequently occurs, then later have to be revised upwards.”

Richard Alldritt, chief executive of the Statistics Commission, the regulator of the ONS, said he was “very much aware of the problem” and had had detailed discussions with Mr Turner. “It’s clear that he does have concerns, so we’re waiting on his interim report and will talk to him about how to go forward,” Mr Alldritt said.

The Revenue revealed yesterday that last year it gave £10.1 billion in tax relief on pensions, not £13.2 billion as it had said.