Pensions Bill

Healthy, solvent employers may have wound up their scheme when employer debt was set at the minimum funding requirement. Such employers should have made good their pensions promise—they were funded at the MFR—so new clause 25, which would allow those schemes in, is inappropriately wide. That is a consequence of the drafting of the new clause rather than any difference of policy. People were asking for the scheme to cover 6,000 pensioners in solvent companies; we are actually covering 8,000. The House is getting slightly over-excited about a point on which there is not a difference.