Pensions Bill

moved Amendment No. 53: 53: After Clause 72, insert the following new Clause— ““Review of the pension scheme (1) The Secretary of State shall lay before both Houses of Parliament a report five years after the establishment of a scheme under section 66. (2) The Secretary of State must consider in the report— (a) whether the maximum amount of contributions specified is appropriate; and (b) whether any further transfers into or out of the scheme should be allowed.”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, the Government’s and, to be fair—fairness being an issue to which we referred at length earlier—PADA’s present intention is to start personal accounts in 2012 and to review their operation, especially in regard to transfers in and out, in 2017. However, I can find literally no one in the pensions industry who really believes that it is conceivably possible to start them as early as 2012. Even if it were, I can find nothing in the Bill to say that any review will take place in 2017, nor that any review will cover the two subjects in subsection (2) of the new clause that I am promoting in the amendment. We discussed this matter in Committee, when the Minister pointed out the plethora of information in the pensions arena which comes out of the department, from surveys of industry and from employers and employees. He mentioned the annual survey of hours and earnings from the ONS, the biennial employers’ pension provision survey, the survey of employers from the DWP and the annual survey of occupational pension schemes. None of these covers what I am after. Personal accounts will be the largest pension scheme to hit this country ever and it would be misleading to think that every jot and tittle of setting them up will be covered by either the Bill’s clauses or the regulations that flow from it. It would also be misleading to state that another pensions Bill will not be needed some time in the next Parliament. To do its job properly, Parliament needs to be informed of the surveys conducted and the decisions flowing from them before the introduction of such a Bill. It does not require a lot of information from scattered sources to achieve that. In Committee, the Minister was unable to give a definitive answer about whether the existing reports and surveys to which I have just referred will include the matters mentioned in subsection (2) of the proposed new clause in my Amendment No. 53; that is, "““whether the maximum amount of contributions specified is appropriate; and … whether any further transfers into or out of the scheme should be allowed””." I accept that this might also cover trivial commutation, on which the noble Baroness waxed fairly lyrical just before the dinner break. On that basis alone the amendment is worthy of consideration. As regards when the report I am requesting should be made, the House will note that there are five years between the planned introduction of personal accounts and the Secretary of State’s intended consideration of these matters. Given that personal accounts may or may not start in 2012, it is only logical that Parliament is informed of the Government’s decisions and the rationale for those decisions five years later. It is intentional that I have not put the dates 2012 and 2017 in the amendment. I beg to move.