Pensions Bill

My Lords, although I support the spirit of this amendment, the noble Baroness will understand if I have hesitations about some of the implications of its detail. She is absolutely right that, even before the implications for debt, the mortgage fears and the unemployment and benefits issues associated with the events of the past couple of months, most people have an amazingly low level of knowledge about pensions, before they get into the even more complex area of the interaction of pensions savings with all other forms of financial expenditure. I again declare an interest as a trustee of TPAS, which has now published its report on the Women’s Pensions Helpline. It found that of the first 10,000 or so women who phoned in on the basic state pension—which is universal and, one might have thought, well known—almost all of whom were over 50, only 14 per cent knew that the state pension age for women is going to increase. Almost 75 per cent did not know that they could make additional voluntary national insurance contributions if they qualified, and 94 per cent did not know that they were not entitled to a basic state pension although they had paid the reduced married woman’s stamp. Those are three of the most elementary pieces of information about the basic state pension—that the age at which women can draw it is rising from 60 to 65 from 2010; that it is possible to make good your contributions—to a limited degree at the moment, but I hope to change that; and that the reduced married woman’s stamp does not count. If that is the situation with the basic state pension, the situation will be even worse regarding private pensions—information about the interactions with benefits, whether one’s priority should be debt reduction, and what one should do when faced with increased pressure on income. The noble Baroness is absolutely right on all that. The widespread need is recognised by all the players, so to speak, in the field, from the CABs, the Resolution Foundation, TPAS, the Government and so on. However, I have three hesitations about the amendment. Perhaps the noble Baroness can help us in her wind-up. The first is that she is talking about advice rather than information. Information is much more neutral and less obviously tailored to the individual, so it can be generic and much more easily provided. The Government have accepted—TPAS may well be prominent in that—the need to provide generic information. Advice seems to me much more difficult to provide because of the numbers involved, especially given that the noble Baroness, perfectly rightly, is specifying that the person should be trained, that the advice should be given face to face, that it should be local and that it should cover the full range of financial issues that may affect that individual. The need to offer that service to possibly 1 million or 2 million people brings me to my concerns about cost, training and the provision of those advisers. I do not think that that is possible. I wish it were, but I doubt that it is, although we have a reasonably long lead-in time to 2012 and I suppose that one could begin the training activity over a period. Does the noble Baroness have any estimates of what costs might be involved? The cost of the financial advice to be provided is about £100 to £200 an hour per person face-to-face. Multiply that by two visits of one hour each by 3 million people and you see the sort of costs that we are talking about—they are huge. I do not know whether the noble Baroness can help me on this. As I said, my heart is with her on the amendment but I find it difficult to see in practical terms how such a wide-ranging amendment can be delivered as she suggests.