Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will cut my speech down from the hour or so that I was planning.
It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) and his powerful and moving speech. It has been a privilege to speak on Second Reading, in the Public Bill Committee and now on Report. It is the first time, as a new MP, that I have seen a Bill through all its stages.
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I have always been interested in talking through new topics with my children at bedtime reading. As both my wife and I are exciting accountants, I want to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) for giving me the idea of teaching them about mortality tables as something for us to get our teeth into.
I suppose the real question is how we make pensions relevant to people in their busy lives so that they do not put them off for another year. How do we make them important to people so that they sit up and take notice of them? Well, we do exactly what this Bill is aiming to do. We make them safer, so that crimes against people’s largest financial assets can be punished. Representing an older demographic in North Norfolk, where, often, people’s pension schemes are their largest financial assets, I know that my constituents will certainly be pleased that the regulator now has the teeth to tackle the problems. We make pensions better, as has been said, and the pension dashboard is a move in the right direction. It will really transform us and take us into the 21st century, because we will have the ability to manage something—if we cannot measure something, we cannot manage it, so this is a real step in the right direction.
We also make pensions greener. As I mentioned on Second Reading, we know that if we go in the direction of making pension trustees consider climate change as a material financial risk for member investments, that will help the entire industry as we move towards our net zero obligations. Finally, we have the leadership of the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman), whose boundless energy and enthusiasm for this Bill has got us to this stage. We should all be commending his efforts to get us here.
I will comment on just a few areas. I recognise why new clause 1 is important. I grew up with the mantra of personal responsibility, which is fairly apt here, because, besides my experience of looking after the company pension scheme in the outside world before I ended up in this place, I always found that advisers were particularly proactive and open and willing to engage with employees about their retirement planning. I think that there are already provisions, information and interventions to outline the options. The Department for Work and
Pensions recently published a policy statement, which included measures on how to take up free and impartial guidance.
I shall be slightly tongue in cheek about new clause 3. I will probably be in trouble for saying this, but whenever the DWP brings in new procedures, the average finance director always feels slightly concerned and thinks, “Oh, no, what have we got to implement now in our businesses?” I remember the quagmire of auto-enrolment. That was met with some dread, but, of course, it turned out to be absolutely the right thing to do, and it has been a monumental success in this country. We got through realtime information, but then when I needed to avoid Making Tax Digital, I had to become an MP.
Seriously, though, in my humble opinion, imposing more procedures and bureaucracy on businesses, especially at the moment, is something that our small and medium-sized enterprises, which make up the backbone of this country, can really do without. We do not need further red tape and procedures. The Government are already dealing with this issue of how small pots can be consolidated as part of the further reporting, and I am sure the Minister will make a comment on that in his summing up.
Finally, as the MP for North Norfolk and a member of the Environmental Audit Committee who has since his election to this place, alongside a quintet of Norfolk and Suffolk MPs, pushed to improve the environmentally damaging effects of connecting our wind farms to the national grid, I absolutely have to make a comment on amendments 16 to 24. This is, as we have heard before, a clear case of the theory not delivering on the reality. What we need here is partnership between businesses and pension trustees to invest in green renewable technologies like the wind farms off my coasts in Weybourne, Sheringham and Happisburgh—parts of the country, Madam Deputy Speaker, where I am sure you have holidayed in many times before and will, I hope, again in future—not a set of restrictive governance criteria, which would most likely cause more divestment in green initiatives than a willingness to embrace and comply.
This is a great Bill. It pushes pension governance and transparency, not to mention investment in green initiatives, forward to the next level, and I commend it to the House.