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Former workers at the old Ford factory in Swansea are feeling a sense of injustice after the company that took on the plant and their jobs in 2000 went bust, leaving gaping holes in their pension fund.

They are now looking to take Ford to court over the way it spun out their jobs to Visteon in an attempt to claw back a pensions shortfall which has left some ex-workers receiving just 60% of what they had been led to expect.

So far their fight has taken them to the Senedd and Westminster, echoing the campaign of Allied Steel and Wire workers in Cardiff when they found out they would get just 10% of their expected pension when ASW went under.

Yet it wasn't meant to be this way.

When the Pension Protection Fund was set up in the wake of the ASW collapse it was described as a "lifeboat" for workers facing much-reduced returns when companies with deficits in their pension schemes went bust.

Five years on, as the number of schemes seeking to join the PPF swells to a flood there are concerns that the Fund is not sufficiently sea-worthy to weather the storm that threatens to engulf the pensions industry.

Pension experts fear that the industry levy that helps fund PPF pay-outs could aggravate the crisis by pushing already creaking pension scheme and companies over the edge and into the PPF.

That would reduce the PPF's income while increasing the number of people it has to pay out to. One answer would be to cut expenditure and reduce the 90% compensation on offer to those below the retirement age.

But that could leave the former Visteon workers and other pensions now aboard the PPF wondering why they were encouraged to climb into such a leaky lifeboat that they now are expected to bail out.

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