My Lords, as my noble friend said, I have an amendment which is very similar to hers. It is worded slightly differently and in my view, and with no disrespect to my noble friend, it is in a better place—in other words, it relates to Clause 3 rather than Clause 2. However, the central issue is that for a lot of people who have worked most of their working life and have paid into the earnings-related pension in its various guises over that period, a figure of £144 or thereabouts will be a significant drop compared with what they might otherwise have expected.
If we are to have a scheme that is going to achieve a reasonable degree of support and consensus across the workforce and among potential and future pensioners, we need to pitch it at a level where existing workers do not miss out. I think that most of us are reasonably convinced that a single-tier answer is the right one, but it has to be structured on the basis of people’s existing expectations. The exact formula that we have in these amendments may not be acceptable to the Government but it needs to be a lot closer to current expectations for this reform to receive the kind of support that the Government are hoping for. At the moment, I know that £144 is, in a sense, a guess—or, if I am being nice to the Government, an informed guess—but it has raised alarm bells, certainly among the trade unions and those who, on pension schemes, represent the workforce who have hoped for more from the earnings-related element of the state pension.
I do not expect the Government to accept these amendments but I hope that they take the issue seriously before we reach the final stages of the Bill, and certainly in the regulations that are coming forward to define the level of the new single-tier pension.