BACK in the 1840s, life in Liverpool was hard. Average male life expectancy was just 26 years.

With so many dying so young, there was little point in saving for a retirement pension and it would be unlikely that anybody would want to offer life assurance to such a miserable market place.

Indeed, life assurance and pension policies were not top of the list of priorities. Those were days when, after all, many people couldn’t even afford their own funerals. Many of the city’s dead were buried in mass graves.

Faced with such indignity, a group of regulars at the Lyver Inn clubbed together to start a mutual burial society, which they named after their pub.

Such a mutual society fulfilled a need in the Victorian era, but more than 150 years later the need for mutuals to fill gaps in the financial services market is no longer so certain, particular relatively small mutuals like Royal Liver.

The society’s relative lack of scale has meant Royal Liver has struggled to make worthwhile annual surpluses that could be distributed to members. Royal London is 10 times bigger, Standard Life is 50 times bigger and Prudential 100 times. These days, you need volume business to pay for the necessary investment in overheads such as IT and compliance with detailed financial services regulations.

Then there is marketing and sales and distribution on top of that. Royal Liver may have more than 1m members and £3bn of investments, but that just isn’t enough. Royal London has 6m members and £30bn of investments.

Despite the hype that invariably surrounds any business these days, the fact is Royal Liver has been in decline for many years. It no longer sells life assurance policies, for example. Its head office staff numbers have declined from close to 1,000 a decade ago to under 300 today.

While Royal Liver management was fudging the issue yesterday, the likelihood has to be that the last remaining staff will leave the Pier Head building sooner rather than later, perhaps transferred to Royal London’s operation in Cheshire.

If that were to happen, it would mean that none of Liverpool’s Three Graces any longer house the businesses they were originally built by, and there would be a significant chance Royal London would sell the 100-year old Royal Liver Building.

The deal is at this stage only a proposal. To become reality, it must first win the approval of both Royal Liver’s membership and the Financial Services Authority.

The merger is almost certainly in the best financial interests of Royal Liver members. Royal London has the sort of scale that should allow it to make bigger distributions to members. Indeed, Royal London is big enough to make sense for it to consider a stock market flotation, one day, meaning Royal Liver members could eventually benefit from a significant windfall.

YOU would think that fast-growing China offers a huge opportunity for Britain’s tourism industry.

There must be tens of millions of affluent Chinese who can afford to travel far and wide.

According to city council cabinet member for employment and skills Nick Small, China Holidays wants to put Liverpool on its itinerary. The firm, however, says it received a cool response from Liverpool City Council and The Mersey Partnership.

When LDP Business sought a response yesterday, the sound of scraping chairs was audible as the quangocrats dived for cover under their desks. Somebody is missing a huge opportunity.