Pensions Bill

My Lords, my noble friend’s amendment is very important. If the noble Lord has not yet read Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, he will enjoy doing so, but the difference between ““might”” and ““is likely to”” is an example of the difference between the real world and the world as we construct it in projections. You cannot ask a manager or someone involved in taking decisions to predict the future with accuracy but you can ask them to make reasonable projections—and projections are all about likelihood. That is all that a manager is able to know. He must ask himself, ““Knowing what I know at the moment and making assumptions about the future, is this likely to have a detrimental affect?””. That is the limit of what you can ask someone to do. To know whether it might is to say that they can tell what extraordinary and unexpected events might be waiting around the corner to happen. When you are projecting one of these things, you might run one of these tests where you choose all sorts of scenarios, going wide and going short, and you look at all the results that might happen and place various likelihoods on them. You come up with a central band of projections, and that is the band you feel you are likely to fall within—but the ““mights”” go right out to the wings, to the projections where you make vast profits or vast losses. If you are using the word ““might””, you are really saying that almost any transaction of any size might have this effect and you are not discriminating in a way that is reasonable or should be the Government’s aim. I am with my noble friend on the wording of her amendment. Mine is much less significant. It says that if someone has failed to keep the proper paperwork, they should not be penalised if, had they kept the proper paperwork, it would have made no difference to the decision they made.