Pensions Bill

The chief executive is to advise the Secretary of State on the decisions to make around that strategy. The objectives that the Secretary of State is following will bind the chair and chief executive of the delivery authority. That is quite clear. It is right in this phase for the objectives to bind the Government. When, subject to the will of Parliament, we have the opportunity to debate this matter in a further instance, we will be able to see exactly what those objectives are. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman and I will delight in talking about this matter in Committee, yet again, in what will be a sort of franchised version of ““Groundhog Day? by then. We have finished our consultation on the White Paper, and it is important that we feed the responses into the development of the policy and that we respond appropriately to the people who have responded to our consultation. We are looking at the consultation responses and it would not be right to pre-empt that by setting objectives for the scheme before we have responded formally to the White Paper consultation. The hon. Gentleman will be glad to know that we are working with the Pensions Policy Institute—his favourite think-tank—on a consultation event. I will be announcing another seminar to keep his diary occupied. He and Members on the Liberal Democrat Front Bench have been assiduous in attending these seminars. [Interruption.] Yes, sometimes even more assiduous that the Government. We thank them yet again for the spirit in which they have engaged in this policy, as well as their indefatigability. As I said, we are creating another seminar for their delectation. The PPI will help us to debate the objectives for the scheme and how members’ interests can be made central to it. We would be happy for hon. Members to take part in the discussion. Other hon. Members can come along too. I agree that it has been valuable to discuss whether we should have objectives, but I hope that the House will agree that actually setting objectives in this Bill would be getting ahead of ourselves. The hon. Member for Eastbourne mentioned the issue of levelling down and I would like to repeat my previous assurances that personal accounts will complement rather than compete with existing pension provision. There is no intention—the hon. Gentleman asked for reassurance on this—to nationalise the pensions industry by the back door. Parts of the pensions industry work extremely well and we want to build on that. We also want to ensure that we can extend the benefits of those parts of the industry that are working well to the rest of the population in order to ensure, for example, that everyone has the chance to get a matching employer contribution. We believe that we have developed a package of proposals that will help us to achieve precisely that. They include a prohibition on transfers, a limit on contributions and a simple scheme exemption test. We hope that that will keep the scheme focused on our target market of low to moderate earners. We will continue to work with stakeholders on additional ways of achieving that.