Financial Assistance Scheme (Miscellaneous Provisions) Regulations 2008

I hope the noble Baroness will live well beyond 120. Next year, that person would be entitled to their old-age pension halfway through their life. That starkly illustrates the challenges that not only state pension provision but private sector provision faces. Broadly, on the legislation that we debated last year, and we will shortly be debating the second Pensions Bill, there is a broad consensus underlying where we are heading on these matters. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, referred to the lifeboat fund. We do not resile from the criticism that we made at the time that, due to a technical matter, it was a rather leaky lifeboat. We went the right way to seeing how we could make better use of the assets in those schemes, and Andy Young’s report was helpful in enabling us to improve the package that we have reflected in part in these regulations. The noble Lord asked about the timetable. I can best illustrate it as follows. In June this year, we hope to have these first regulations in force and the first payments at 90 per cent, and first payments from NRA or 60 rather than 65, will start to flow. By the end of July we expect the second regulations package to come into force, which will cover ill-health payments, certain solvent schemes being included in FAS and the groundwork for greater PPF involvement and speeding up payments. In August, we hope that the first of those ill-health payments will be flowing. By the end of the year, we propose to consult on further regulations to deliver the full December package. That will include the post-1997 indexation payment of FAS lump sums and the bringing of assets into government to enable these wider benefits to be provided. From April 2009, there will be a phased implementation of the full package. There is a lot of technical stuff that has to be addressed between now and getting that full package implemented, which is why we wanted to get these regulations under way as quickly as possible.