Pensions Bill

Perhaps I may anticipate the general answer that the Minister will give, in that guidance is already available on much of the information covered by the amendments. However, I would press him on unfair competition. Further to his earlier point about regulated advice and generic advice, if generic advice on basic pension accounts is to be unregulated, is the implication that people who believe that they have been misadvised will not be able to seek compensation for mis-selling? If we are creating a set of products and a set of advice around them which does not have that mis-selling risk associated with it and the costs of compliance that are driven by that risk, we need to understand that that would be an issue of unfair competition. If there is a division between products that can be sold only by regulated advice and those that can be sold by generic advice, is the implication that an agency giving pension advice will be able to advise only on whether a particular form of basic pension account is applicable and not on whether an alternative, perhaps regulated, product would be better suited to someone’s needs? We need to understand whether it is the intention to set up a system that can advise people only on a limited and maybe suboptimal set of available products. If we are dismissing the need to write into the Bill conditions on unfair competition, it would be helpful clearly to understand where the Government wish to draw those boundary lines on fair and unfair competition.