The government's pensions commissioner hinted strongly yesterday that he plans to put forward radical measures to solve the pensions crisis when he publishes his wide-ranging report in the autumn.

Adair Turner said tinkering with the current system was not a viable option and that Britain could not afford to simply "muddle through".

The former employers' federation boss outlined what he believed to be the main options for reform in an interim report last October. Mr Turner said some 12 million workers were failing to save enough for their retirement and would need to save more, pay higher taxes or work longer - or a mixture of all three.

In a speech at the National Association of Pension Funds' annual conference yesterday he went further, and signalled that some pillars of the present system were already earmarked as areas for reform by the commission.

He said the earnings-related element of the state pension, formerly known as Serps, was understood by few people and was overly complex.

One option would be to integrate the second state pension with the basic state provision and make the payment higher and less means-tested.

The other, he said, would repackage the second pension as a compulsory saving vehicle, with benefits directly related to what workers put in.

He later told BBC Radio 4's World at One that it was important to make people feel "they really have an account that belongs to them".

Mr Turner said this could be invested initially in government bonds but could later be expanded to include a wider range of assets.

"What I said today is we have got to choose one or other of these directions, because at the moment we have a complete muddle which nobody understands," he said.

He went on to argue that public-sector pensions, like all guaranteed final-salary schemes, were unaffordable in the longer term and should be reformed so that workers shouldered more risk.

"The public sector as an employer should not be making, at the expense of future taxpayers, promises to today's 25-year-old new employees, to pay pensions of a certain value at a certain age independent of whatever happens to life expectancy," he said.

Mr Turner's comments are likely to find favour with the new pensions secretary, David Blunkett, who addressed the same conference on Thursday to say that he planned to press ahead with radical reforms of pension rules.