Government policy has, understandably, been a major preoccupation of the pensions interests in the post-war decades. Both the tax regime and contracting-out provisions for the earnings-related state pensions had profound effects on the coverage and shape of occupational pension schemes in that period. But the pensions institutions and the market for old age savings also had a dynamic of their own. Changes in the employment relationship, with further growth of large-scale, bureaucratic organizations and labour shortages under full employment conditions, increased the demand for pensions from both employers and employees. In the 1960s and 1970s more than a million employees were transferred from the private to the public sector, where employees were more likely to demand and get pension coverage. In private industry, too, a wave of mergers created substantially larger organizations, and this usually resulted in the adoption of pensioning in parts of the organization where it had not existed before. As the size of the pensions market expanded, other financial institutions joined the insurance companies, competing for what was becoming a rapidly growing sector of the market for personal savings.