Pensions Bill

My apologies, my Lords; I did not address those specific questions. With regard to the unfunded public service pension liabilities as calculated, the latest figure I have is the one the noble Lord cited, £650 billion. That figure looks at a stream of payments and applies some form of discount rate to it. I urge the noble Lord—this is the more important thing—to look at the projections for public service pensions that are made in the long-term public finance report, because they reflect the agreement made in 2005. The latest report, published in March 2008, showed that expenditure on unfunded public service pension benefits remains affordable; it is projected to increase from around 1.5 per cent of GDP to a maximum of 2 per cent over the next 50 years. I remind him, when he considers those figures, that they partly reflect that there are now more people working in the public sector than in the past: more nurses, more teachers, more doctors. We should be pleased about that. However, the sustainability of that can be seen in the long-term public finance report.