Bank of England Chief Economist, Andy Haldane has said that property is a better investment for retirement than a pension.

Speaking to the Sunday Times, Haldane said: “It ought to be pension but it’s almost certainly property.

“As long as we continue not to build anything like as many houses in this country as we need to… we will see what we’ve had for the better part of a generation, which is house prices relentlessly heading north.”

Haldane has previously come under fire for stating that he can’t make “the remotest sense of pensions” and that experts and IFAs “have no clue either”.

Former pensions minister Ros Altmann has described the remarks as “irresponsible” and “divorced from reality”.

Tom McPhail, head of retirement policy at Hargreaves Lansdown, commented: “It’s probably quite easy for someone with a gold-plated final salary pension to dismiss the importance of saving in a pension for retirement. Andy Haldane’s pension benefits are estimated to be worth in excess of £3 million, which is not bad going for someone who professes not to even know how pensions work. Perhaps we should take away his final salary pension and just give him another house instead.

“After his previous comments, we wrote to Mr Haldane, offering to explain how pensions work. After these latest revelations from him, we suggest his employers make a pension training course compulsory, given he has so much influence over the savings and investments of millions of ordinary savers and home-owners and so little apparent understanding of how they work.”

McPhail stressed the benefits of saving into a pension, including tax relief and workplace pension top ups. He added that pensions are cheap to run, typically costing around 0.75% a year compared to the running costs of a property which “can easily be as much as 10% of the value”.

He also highlighted that retirees can diversify their investments, spreading tax-free savings across a range of funds, stocks, asset classes and “even properties”.