I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) for promoting the Bill and I congratulate her on navigating it through to this stage. I have done a private Member’s Bill so I know that that is no mean feat. It requires a huge amount of work, which has been on display today, as have her skills in getting this through. I also thank the Opposition for their support for the Bill, and I thank all of those who have spoken today: my hon. Friends the Members for Clwyd South (Simon Baynes), for Watford (Dean Russell), for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), for Wantage (David Johnston) and for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller). I will endeavour to deal with as many of his questions as I can, but I will write to him on any I am unable to address. I also pay tribute to my predecessors in this role, my hon. Friends the Members for Hexham (Guy Opperman) and for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), who spoke in support of the Bill on Second Reading and in Committee respectively. I am proud to complete the trio.
Private pensions have undergone a quiet revolution in recent decades. It used to be the case that retirement income was guaranteed by the employer via a defined benefit pension. That started to change with the introduction of defined contribution schemes in the early 1990s. Those types of schemes put the risk of the eventual outcome entirely at the feet of the employees, with no guaranteed contribution from employers. That clearly has a huge potential impact on the adequacy of someone’s private pension for retirement, and introduced a huge new complex financial world for individuals to navigate. The intergenerational impact of this is stark. One group of people is able to retire on a guaranteed pension provided by their employer and have protections—provided by the financial assistance scheme and, latterly, the Pension Protection Fund— in respect of the employer going bust. The second group of people are given no guarantees on the value of their pension, if indeed they have one at all, and they are exposed to market conditions, are reliant on the performance of their individual fund, and wildly different levels of contribution are made by the employer—in some cases, none are made at all.
That is why the introduction of automatic enrolment in 2012 was so important. My hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle is right to say that automatic enrolment has been an incredible success and has achieved a transformational effect on retirement savings in the UK, both by employers and by employees. It has seen millions more people working to contribute to their workplace pension and has normalised workplace pension saving. Automatic enrolment is re-establishing a culture of retirement saving for a new generation, with more than 10.8 million workers enrolled into a workplace pension to date and an additional £33 billion more saved in real terms in 2021 than in 2012.