For the year to January pre-tax profits rose 66 per cent to £7

For the year to January pre-tax profits rose 66 per cent to £7.59m.The figures came the day after Olympus Sports, the rival chain owned by Sears, announced losses of £2m."We know our market and we don't go into fashion areas where something is hot one month and then disappears," Mr Whelan said.JJB's sales last year increased across all categories of merchandise, including a 35 per cent jump in the sale of replica shirts. JJB now has 126 stores and a further 24 will open this year.Results announced yesterday show the company has comfortably beaten the profit forecast made when it floated in November. The first out-of-town store will open in Rotherham in July and five more are planned for the year. "We want to expand aggressively," Mr Whelan said. Sales at a high-street store featuring an activity area that was opened in Birmingham earlier this month have been stronger than expected. How many people now live in a house without heating or a bathroom? We are rich enough to pay for our own old age.". JJB Sports, the sports-shop chain run by former Blackburn Rovers footballer David Whelan, is to roll out a chain of out-of-town stores featuring activity areas with basketball hoops and goals manned by cardboard cut-outs of goalkeepers such as Blackburn's Tim Flowers.

People must see property as part of their retirement savings, we shall have to rethink our inheritance expectations," Mrs Robinson says.Though many of us are likely in future to be less well off as we save more of current earnings for old age, Mrs Robinson has little time for the inference that people will feel poorer."We have all become richer in the past 30-40 years - look at GDP, at the social data. "Is it so extraordinary that people, when they go into a nursing home, should sell their house to pay the fees? Caring for the elderly is damned expensive, and the state simply cannot cope any more," she notes.This fact has been dramatically brought home by the recent change in the law, which has seen the state largely withdraw from paying for nursing home care, shifting the funding burden to the individual who must use savings and home to cover costs that can be £1,500 a month."The idea of property cascading down the generations is no longer on. We are coming to a completely new set of expectations, where people want low inflation, and will feel better off having savings rather than speculating on house prices."People must get used to thinking of a broad range of savings for old age, including their home. Moreover, as Mrs Robinson says, people will have to get used to saving again for the long term."We British have become inflation junkies, addicted to property booms, rushing out to drink champagne today and never mind tomorrow.

As individuals start to save more for old age, there will be a massive increase in funds to be managed.Although the change will be far greater on the Continent, where pension funds are largely undeveloped, the savings and investment landscape in Britain would also be radically transformed. Employees are retiring early; working and remuneration patterns are changing dramatically; the investment climate has grown tougher, and there are constantly new regulations and provisions, all placing huge strains on the traditional ability of firms to give the generous guarantee of a pension based on final salary.A number of household-name companies are considering whether they may have to move to schemes whereby people's pensions are defined by how much they contribute - meaning that if they want decent provision they will probably have to pay considerably more out of current earnings.While such pressures are a headache for many pension managers, they also hold out the prospect of vast new wealth for the industry as a whole. But it is not just the state that is cracking.Companies with their own occupational pension schemes are facing the difficulties of fewer workers paying contributions to finance a growing army of pensioners. They will be very expensive to care for.The state, desperately overstretched, is trying to reduce its commitments. To carry on as now with old-age provision would send taxation through the roof.