HERE are some staggering statistics from the Department for Work and Pensions.

Currently there are around 12,000 centenarians in this country with fewer than 100 of them being aged over 110.

By the year 2080, the projection is that there will be 626,900 people over 100 years of age - with 21,000 of these being 110 or over.

The economic consequences of this demographic ‘agequake’ are massive and the figures put into some kind of context the government’s attempt to reform the pensions system.

The state is having to support more and more people for longer and longer and it’s not pensions that represent a ticking timebomb, but health and social care too.

In the light of the Hutton report, commissioned by the government and published yesterday, millions of people employed by the state are now beginning to realise that the golden age of the public sector is coming to an end.

There may be plenty of kicking, screaming and railing against the unfairness of it all, with threats of widespread industrial action. But the world has changed and the pensions system has to follow suit.

• Remember the Liberal Democrat conferences in Bournemouth in the good old day days, when you could wander in and out of the conference venues more or less unhindered and the security was so low key as to be almost invisible?

Not these days.

A “ring of steel” has been put up in the heart of Sheffield ahead of this weekend’s Spring conference, to keep out an expected 10,000 demonstrators - at a cost of some £2m.

Oh, the price of power.