(Consultation by Employers and Miscellaneous Amendment)Regulations 2006

My Lords, I am again most grateful to the Minister. I am the first to agree that consultation is necessary when an employer proposes a change to a pension scheme. Such changes, as the Minister has said, may involve a move from a defined benefits scheme to a money purchase scheme. I note that full consultation is to be phased in, so that, in the first instance, a requirement to consult applies only to firms employing more than 150 staff from April this year. From April 2007 it will be firms with 100 to 150 staff; and from April 2008, it will be firms with 50 or more—unless, as the Minister said in his introduction, they are exempted. That rather confused me. Just who may be exempted, and why? It is good employer practice to consult, and I recognise the list of consultees that the Minister gave us. My problem, however, is that the employer may choose from recognised trade union representatives, elected or appointed information and consultation representatives, those under any pre-existing consultation arrangements or representatives of the pension scheme—I stress ““or””. Why is the department allowing employers to ““perm”” one from five, to use a football pools analogy? Pension scheme representatives should always be consulted, and at least one other—either trade union, or elected or appointed information and consultation representatives. I shall change track slightly. Consultations are all very well, but they must be real—by which I mean that the employer must be prepared to change his mind, either in general or particular, otherwise there is no point in consultation at all. I note that these regulations attempt to make these consultations real, and the Minister has explained how this is to be done. Being of a suspicious nature, however, I had asked him how this is to be policed. Are there to be arrangements for an appeal to the Pensions Regulator if the consultees feel that they have been ignored, or what? The original information and consultation of employees regulations—the so-called ICE regulations—were an important step forward in employer/employee relations. They established the right of employees to be consulted on an ongoing basis about matters which affect them. It seems obvious that changes to pension schemes would indeed affect employees, and would therefore be covered by the ICE regulations. It would be regulation gone mad, however, if employers had to consult about listed pension scheme changes under both that and the first of these two sets of regulations. Today’s second lot of regulations requires that as long as the employer tells his employees’ representatives under which regulations he is consulting them, he has to do so under only one regulation. That is common sense, and I am delighted to see the Information and Consultation of Employees (Amendment) Regulations 2006. I am even more delighted to see that the Government have taken note of their consultation, and that that consultation, at least, was real.