Pensions Bill

I realise that for many Members the whole question of the administration of pension funds is extremely complex and detailed. I find it useful to refer back to the time when I started as a county councillor in Nottinghamshire. We had just appointed a chief executive—a person who, at that time, called himself Mick Lyons. He has been elevated somewhat since then. He invited us to identify problems in the administration of local government within the county. A number of us identified that schools were having serious problems in accessing the resources that they needed. He got a number of councillors and a number of the officers in different departments together and he asked people to explain what the problem was and what was causing the gap between the time when the schools sought to requisition pencils and paper and the time when anything arrived. The delay was often six weeks, two months or two and a half months. He listened patiently to the explanations from officials in different departments for about 20 to 25 minutes. Then suddenly he banged his hand on the table and said, ““Right. I’ve got a plan.? Everyone shut up and listened to him. He said, ““Send the bloody pencils and the paperwork can follow. I don’t care about the paperwork that follows. It’s not that it’s not important, but schools are about learning. It is about delivering the resources for learning. If schools haven’t got pencils and paper, we are undermining their primary function. So send the bloody pencils.? If we were having that same debate among ourselves today, the central issue would be, ““Send the bloody pensions.? It is not about the technicalities. The reason why I support new clause 41, which is a cross-party new clause, is that it says precisely that. We have a moral duty to pay people’s pensions today and to use the lifeboat fund to work out among ourselves how best to reclaim the resources that we have at our fingertips in order to do that. My only quibble in political terms is that I wish that new clause 41 had been tabled principally in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), because, as been acknowledged, the origin of almost everything in that new clause was rightly encapsulated in the private Member’s Bill that he presented to the House in 2002. It would be helpful for our own Members to be able to recognise and claim the integrity of that as a starting point. But I no longer care who claims the credit. What I am concerned about is that we are dealing with people who have never asked for a penny of a handout in their lives. They are people who have done what successive Governments have asked them to do: take money out of their weekly and monthly earnings and put it into pension funds in order to provide for their old age. We will not be able to convince successive generations who follow that that is a sensible step if their parents or grandparents say to them: ““We were mugs. We put the money aside and people stole it.? The great attraction of what is incorporated in new clause 41 is that it allows us to draw a simple line under a debate that will not go away if as a House we fail to take this decision today. New clause 41 brings everyone under the cover of the Pension Protection Fund. It does not say that there is going to be a huge delay. It says that we will pay out today and that we will work out how we will reclaim and repay the assets afterwards. It does not presume that there are billions of pounds to be found. However, the volume of unclaimed assets in this country is about £15 billion—£3 billion in unclaimed pension funds, £5 billion in terms of banks and building societies, £3 billion in national savings, and another £1 billion to £2 billion in residual assets in the existing schemes. So we would not be short of possible sources. Nor is it true to say that all that money would have to be found now. My understanding is that the £600 million that would need to be put aside works out, on the Government’s own figures, at about £20 million a year. Just to provide a reference point, we should understand that the error factor in the Department for Work and Pensions budget for the administration of benefits last year was not £20 million, but £700 million. It is not beyond the Government’s and the House’s capacity to incorporate everyone affected into a scheme that would achieve what we promised at the end of the Maxwell fiasco. We promised people then that it would never happen again. Yet we now find ourselves in a position, five years after an event, in which many people who saved throughout their lives are living—and, in some cases, dying—in abject poverty. That is morally outrageous and morally indefensible. I would like to end on a non-technical and non-political point with the line of a song by Tracy Chapman—[Interruption.] I will spare the House by not singing it! In that song, she said:"““A love declared for days to come is as good as none?." The same could be said about a pension, so I hope that the House has the decency to do the morally right and the politically and financially accessible thing by drawing the line today and supporting new clause 41.