Pensions Bill

I hear my hon. Friend’s sedentary comment, but I take no credit for my constituent being 110, apart from the fact that he is claiming the benefits to which he is entitled—or not, as the case may be! I would like to spend a few minutes talking about levelling down, which is still a major concern. The law of unintended consequences is, like the word ““Blackpool? through a stick of rock—very much part of pensions legislation. We certainly saw it at work with the Pensions Act 2004. There are real concerns in the industry that the advent of personal accounts will bring about a levelling down and that finance directors will, as I said earlier, take a quick, sharp look at the extra cost caused by the extra participation introduced by auto-enrolment and suggest to their employees that they might be better served by going through the personal accounts system. As the deputy director general of the Association of British Insurers, Mr. Stephen Sklaroff, said a little while ago:"““We hope the Government is not deliberately trying to fix the system so more money flows into personal accounts so it can keep down costs to artificially low levels.?" He then spoke about raising the contribution cap, which he said was"““completely inconsistent with earlier pledges to target people on lower incomes. Our industry cannot be forced to compete with a subsidised system?." I developed arguments about the contribution cap earlier today and I am afraid to say that I did not find the Minister’s remarks about it particularly reassuring, so we shall watch what develops. There is some potential for mis-selling. Ministers love to go on about previous mis-selling scandals, but the issue very much remains in respect of people auto-enrolled into personal accounts who would actually be well advised to opt out. I am thinking of people on low incomes with high credit card debts. In my intervention on the hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble), I referred to the excellent work of the PPI on risk categories. It looked at two distinct ages—people aged 40 and 25 in 2012—and examined categories where people are ““at risk?, meaning that they are unlikely to receive back the value of their individual contributions to personal accounts. That is a real concern that needs to be looked at further, not only as part of the Thoresen review, but more generally. I conclude by talking about confidence. When the Government are proposing to launch a brand new pensions system designed to appeal to 7 million, 8 million, 9 million or perhaps 10 million people who are currently not saving for their retirement, it really beggars belief that Ministers are so blind to the danger to confidence posed by existing problems in the system. How can we expect younger workers to save for their retirement when almost every week they see bad news stories about people who have lost their pensions? How can the Minister talk about sending a signal from this House based on consensus when the actual signal we have sent today is that we are not prepared to give proper help to the 125,000 people who have lost their pensions? The Minister should be in no doubt that that is indeed the signal that we have sent out. Yesterday, the Chancellor was finally cornered in this Chamber over his raid on pension funds. Was he embarrassed, abashed, apologetic? Not a bit of it. He said:"““I tell the House that I do not apologise?," and he went on to say:"““We made the right decision?.—[Official Report, 17 April 2007; Vol. 459, c. 176-183.]" Tell that to the 125,000 people who have lost their pensions. They are the most salient issue today. We must not forget that everyone in the country with a pension scheme has lost out to some extent, because of the £100 billion that the Chancellor has sucked out of the retirement savings system. It is a cause for genuine regret that Labour Members were whipped to vote down a package of help for those people that was sensible, deliverable and fair—one based on the sort of cross-party consensus that the Minister liked to talk about in his speech. Having created the problem, the Chancellor is happy to leave them without help or to the tender mercies of the failed financial assistance scheme. I shall interrupt the Minister’s private conversation for a moment by reminding him that he suggested earlier in our debates—or, indeed, it might have been the Secretary of State—that the Government came forward initially with plans to produce the financial assistance scheme and that the Government were the ones on the front foot in trying to improve these matters. The fact is that, on 14 May 2004, the Government were forced to produce in a hurry their proposals for the FAS, with a price tag of £400 million that had no basis in fact or research at the time, because they were facing defeat in the House—a defeat based on our opposition and that of the Liberal Democrats, other parties and a large number of Labour rebels. The hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws) pointed out earlier in our debates that, at every point, the Government have been dragged here kicking and screaming to put in a bit of extra money or to make some concessions. How long will it take before they make the final concessions that justice demands? They have been told on no fewer than four separate occasions—by the ombudsman, by the European Court, by the Select Committee and by the High Court—that there has been maladministration, but their reaction is that everybody else is wrong and that they are right, and they are even appealing the High Court decision. They are still ignoring the legitimate demands of the pension victims, but even this Government should not have ignored the voice of the House. Those Labour Members with constituents facing penury who failed to support the cross-party package this evening must answer to their own consciences and to their own constituents. As I have said, the Chancellor claims that he would do the same again, but the circumstances that surround the decision in 1997 throw a penetrating shaft of light on to the Chancellor’s real thoughts on the matter. Courtesy of the former Paymaster General, we now know that this policy was created in conditions of the utmost secrecy. It was hidden from the British public during the 1997 election campaign, when the Labour party had the effrontery to make a centrepiece of its campaign our pensions policy, while its policy was firmly locked in a safe at the Grosvenor House hotel. It was then acted on in the teeth of advice to the contrary from civil servants and the CBI, among others. But most telling of all, the Chancellor fought for two long, bitter years to resist the freedom of information request from The Times. Finally, the information was slipped out on a Friday, when the House had risen for the Easter recess. Is it not incredible that, yesterday, when questioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Miss Kirkbride)—