My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, and the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, for this opportunity for the Government to set out our actions to support people in this area. I need to point out that when the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, says that he is offering some relief, I am reminded of the song by Tom Lehrer about sliding down the razor blade of life, but there we are.
On the noble Lord’s first question about the new class 3A voluntary NICs, we will have a debate in the new year, and will work with stakeholders to get a clear and simple offer to pensioners, which will include how we publicise that new scheme, so that information will be available.
Including financial education in the school curriculum and increasing young people’s financial capability is an issue of importance to this Government and apposite to the point raised by my noble friend Lord German. In July 2013, the Department for Education published a national curriculum framework with increased focus on financial literacy in both the mathematics and citizenship curricula. This will be taught in schools from September 2014. In 2012, we established the Money Advice Service to help people manage their money more effectively and better understand financial products, including pensions. The Money Advice Service is one of our key partners in providing information to individuals who are being automatically enrolled into workplace pensions. The department has also played an active role in developing the Money Advice Service’s new financial capability strategy to help tackle the knowledge gaps which can inhibit individuals from saving in pensions.
We know that the delivery of information and government policy around financial capability has the potential to build trust and engagement in pension saving, and we are proud of our progress in this area. Our Automatic Enrolment and Pensions Language Guide,
developed with partners in the pensions and financial services industry, promotes a consistent and simplified use of language in order to ensure that individuals seeking advice can better understand the information. In October this year the Government published updated regulations setting out the information that occupational and personal pension schemes are obliged to provide to their members, and the frequency with which this is to be done.
I turn specifically to the state pension reforms in the Bill. We are committed to taking action to help people to understand the reforms that we are making and what it will mean for them. As noble Lords know, the current state pension system is fiendishly complicated. In a 2012 survey, in response to a simple true/false question, only one-third of people agreed that it was true that the Government provided a second state pension related to previous earnings. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, noted its complexity and gave lots of saddening statistics. That is precisely why we are reforming the system to make it—in principle—comprehensive to as many people as possible. We are tackling this systemic problem by creating a simpler state pension so that everyone can know both what counts towards their state pension and how much they can expect to receive. However, we recognise that the benefits of this simpler system can be realised only if we communicate the changes effectively to the public.
I turn to the noble Lord‘s amendment about the timely provision of individualised state pension information. The Department for Work and Pensions currently offers a state pension statement service, which allows people to request an estimate of how much state pension they may get, based on their national insurance record to date. Last year, 2012-13, over 600 statements were provided.