Pensions Bill

The noble Baroness, whom I am sure had great hopes for the stakeholder scheme, has to accept that it was an abject failure. Many empty stakeholder schemes were set up because employers had to have some form of provision available, but they did not have to try to enrol anybody into them. There was absolutely no encouragement to see stakeholders alongside existing provision. It was an entirely separate experiment which failed. There is absolutely no doubt about that. It was never conceived on the same scale as this. It was never marketed or developed to operate alongside. It simply never took off. The statistics are relatively clear. The sheer volume of saving in stakeholders is testimony to that.