We do not think about our pensions enough, let alone talk about them enough. We should acknowledge the fact that a lot of people did not have them, which is why auto-enrolment has been such an important policy. Since this Government introduced auto-enrolment, nearly 11 million more people have been saving into a pension, although some people still do not have them. Auto-enrolment has been a welcome development.
Even people who do have a pension can find them difficult to understand. They see an amount on their pay slip that disappears from their pay, but they do not really have a sense of what that will mean for them in retirement. The total sum that they have saved may look large until it is divided across their life expectancy after they have retired; that might make it seem a much smaller sum. We know that contributions are not generally at the levels they should be.
We are very fortunate to have a Minister who is passionate about pensions, and about making sure that people have good pensions that are clearly understood. That is also why these dashboards will be so important, because it is a complex area that people do not understand, and having one place where someone can clearly see how much money they have saved will help them to plan for their retirement. To the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), people often collect several pensions through their working lives from different places that are not easily transferable. They can entirely lose the information about them; they have no sense of how much is in each of them, or how to bring them together and what that might mean. As such, the Bill is very welcome.
We have often seen scandals arise from the complexity of pensions, and we all know of very high-profile national scandals involving pensions. We know of some local cases—I have my own local case that I have been working on—where people have thought their money would be well guarded, but have found decades later that the promises that were made to them have been abandoned, and when they have tried to seek redress, they have felt blown off by authorities: “Too late, too bad. You’ve lost that money.” As such, while I would like to think that none of the people managing pensions would take money out of their assets in order to pay fines, I am afraid that based on all the things we have seen in the pension industry over the years, I do not
have that confidence. I totally accept that it will be a small minority, but the safeguard in the Bill is a very important one to have in place, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle on bringing it in.
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