Pensions Bill

The Minister has referred to ““Groundhog Day? at least once this evening. We could go on having this discussion till kingdom come, but it is not going to change anything. I have made it clear more than once what my hon. Friend intended by those words and I cannot add or subtract anything to or from that. I was talking about carers and the excellent work done on the Bill by my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire. We also broadly support the gradual increase in the state pension age, but we recognise that there is much more to be done in relation to flexible working and retraining for older workers. We have given our broad support to the proposals for personal accounts, but, again, as I explained to some extent in relation to one of the groups of amendments earlier today, we still have serious concerns about the design of the new system and the extent to which we should include in this Bill, rather than the next Bill, the basic parameters of success or failure for the system for personal accounts. On Second Reading, I flagged up four major concerns about personal accounts: means testing, the risk of levelling down, the potential for mis-selling, and the issue of confidence. Those concerns still exist. I do not want to develop in any more detail than I have already today the issue of means testing. The Minister and the Pensions Policy Institute will just have to agree to disagree—without being disagreeable about it. They are never going to reach a consensus, and the more the Minister tried to explain his way out of that problem, the more he seemed to say that nobody can ever really know, so we are boldly taking a step into utter darkness with no way of knowing what will happen. The only thing we can say with certainty is that by 2040 or 2050, none of us will still be developing these arguments. Having said that, one of my constituents is 110, so perhaps there is hope for all of us.