Pensions Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that reply, but it just will not do. I set myself a little test of whether we would be given two particular figures. The first was the Government’s figure for unfunded liability, and I noticed that we did not get an answer to that. The figure was from 2006, but this is 2008. These are big sums of money. Speaking for myself as a parliamentarian, I think we are entitled to that level of information at the very least. The second thing that I was anxious to see whether the Government would share with us was the essential year-on-year cost saving from the 2002 Green Paper reforms. Answer came there none on that question either. If the Minister cannot give me figures for these things, that illustrates the fact that this is very hard. He talks about available information, but some of it is technical and you have to know where to look for it. I did my best over the past week to get all the information that was available to me. If I had not had the Pensions Institute’s report, I would have been struggling to form a view about whether this was a sensible thing to do. There is a huge amount at stake here, and this is an issue for Parliament. If we as parliamentarians are willing to let the Government get away with not being required to produce the information that we need to make objective decisions, we are not doing our job properly.