His brother Brian, who helped him set up the business, owns 10 per cent, while Craig Bennett, the group finance director, has 5 per cent. The price the two private equity players paid for the firm surprised analysts. The tycoon John Caudwell yesterday netted £1.3bn from the sale of his mobile phones empire to the private equity firms Doughty Hanson and Providence Equity Partners. By 2010, analysts predict the segment could be worth more than £5bn. Orange is the first mobile company to push upfront advertising in a significant way in the UK.

Initially, only customers with certain high-end handset models will see the adverts but by next year, most Orange customers using its portal will have to contend with advertising Orange will soon be joined by other players. Vodafone has identified mobile advertising as a key growth area as it looks to offset the impact of lower prices and greater competition in its mature European markets. Mobile phones offer advertisers an opportunity to pipe information about products and services directly into a consumer's pocket. The personal nature of the mobile phone, combined with the information that mobile telecoms companies have about customers' habits and preferences when using their mobile phone, can be harnessed to target adverts at specific users. Advertising on mobile phones is seen as raking in about £60m this year but is expected to double in 2007. It is the first major attempt by a mobile telecoms company to use the ubiquitous mobile handset to open up a lucrative new revenue stream that could turn the global advertising market on its head.

Orange has signed up major advertisers including Jaguar, Peugeot and Microsoft's Xbox to put interactive advertisements onto to its mobile internet portal. "People have lost trust in the pension industry because there has been a series of mis-selling scandals and employees have watched their employers withdrawing from occupational pension provision," Ms Carberry said.Joanne Segars, director of policy at the National Association of Pension Funds, warned that plans to launch a new national pension scheme might hinder attempts to reverse the trend. "If we want to increase the amount of money saved as well as the number of savers, the Government needs to make sure that the new accounts do not add to pressure on the superior pension schemes that already exist."The Department for Work and Pensions said the Government had already taken steps to halve the number of pensioners on low incomes to a million and had proposed "bold reforms" to the pension system in its White Paper earlier this year.James Purnell, the pensions reform minister, said: "Our reforms will make the State Pension more generous by linking it to earnings, and will make it easier for people to save by automatically enrolling up to 10 million employees into a system of low-cost personal accounts."There are also up to 4.5 million people who could be taking advantage of contributory pension schemes their employers provide, but are currently not doing so."We are committed to support and strengthen good occupational pension provision - in the White Paper we announced a deregulatory review to reduce bureaucracy and cost for people running schemes.". Government initiatives such as the launch of stakeholder pension plans in 2001, intended to simplify saving, have failed to reverse the decline.Helen McCarthy, head of pensions and savings development at the Association of British Insurers, said: "As people spend more and build up more debt it's not surprising, though still alarming, that levels of saving are falling."Kay Carberry, assistant general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, said the figures were so bad that the pension reforms unveiled by the Government earlier this year would, in isolation, not be sufficient to reverse the trend.

The increase was higher than for any other age group, even though older workers have less time than younger colleagues to remedy shortfalls in their pension savings.In addition, last year alone, the total number of people across all working ages not making pension provision rose by almost 250,000, following a 600,000 increase in the previous year.Three years ago the Association of British Insurers (ABI) warned Britons were falling £27bn a year short of the amount needed to finance a comfortable old age. Over the same period, the number of people in work has risen by just 8 per cent.The analysis also reveals the people most likely not to be making any pension provision at all are those who most need to do so - and that the crisis is continuing to worsen.The ONS figures indicate that between 1997 and 2005 there was a 45 per cent increase in the number of workers aged between 55 and 64 not saving for old age. Analysis of little-noticed government data shows that a nine-year trend of falling pension provision worsened in 2005 despite continued warnings that Britons are failing to save for old age. Almost 12 million workers, more than two-fifths of the working population, failed to make a penny of pension savings in 2005, according to new figures released last week by the Office of National Statistics (ONS).But a study by The Independent of ONS reports, known as the annual survey of hours and earnings, shows that last year was simply the latest in a marked trend to lower pension provision.The ONS figures reveal that the number of people not making any pension provision at all has risen by more than 13 per cent since 1997, with an increase in non-savers in every year except one. Britain's pension crisis deepened further last year despite a series of attempts to encourage workers to save more and a marked recovery in stock market fortunes, according to official figures. They will look to this week's briefing by Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, to answer that question at the launch of the Bank's quarterly inflation report.Michael Saunders, an economist at Citigroup, said last week's increase simply fulfilled the tightening that was implicit in the Bank's May inflation report.But Robert Barrie, chief European economist at Credit Suisse, said: "You don't raise rates once unless and until you are prepared to do it more than once."It takes more than [a quarter-point] to make much difference to anything.".

Peter Bolton King, chief executive of the National Association of Estate Agents, said: "As interest rates are still at low levels compared with past averages, we believe the property market can absorb a 0.25 per cent rise this time."Analysts are split over whether last week's was the first of many or simply a "stitch in time" to prevent the need for higher rates. With too many buyers chasing too few sellers, the pressure for property prices to rise further will only intensify."Soaring house prices was cited by the Bank of England as one of the reasons for its unexpected decision to raise the base rate by a quarter-point last week to 4.75 per cent. Many industry experts believe the housing market will be able to take the rise in borrowing costs in its stride as it is so well supported by factors such as a lack of supply. However only 633,000 properties are currently on the market in the UK, meaning that buyers are out numbering sellers by almost 2.5 to 1.David Newnes, managing director of Your Move Estate Agents, said: "While the number of active buyers has reached a record high, a reluctance to put their own properties onto the market has resulted in an acute shortage of supply. More than 1.5 million new buyers registered with estate agents in the UK last month, the highest number on record, the figures show. While the vast majority of these buyers are existing home owners, they are refusing to put their own property on the market, it said. Your Move, an estate agents chain, said it estimated that 1.52 million new buyers registered with UK estate agents in July.