I thank the Minister for that response and am also very grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this discussion. The noble Lord joked at the beginning that the Turner commission had been quorate. I think when he reads Hansard he may find that slightly less funny than it seemed on the face of it. If I was sitting where he was sitting and two-thirds of the members of the pensions commission told me that I had got this wrong—auto-enrolment and all that flowed from it was based on their recommendations—I would be thinking very hard indeed at this point.
I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Turner, for what seemed to me a pretty damning indictment of the fact that, although we may share an objective, the way the Government are going about trying to achieve this will not tackle the very grave consequences of market failure in the pensions market for savers who are depending on the results of those investments for their retirement income. As my noble friend Lady
Turner pointed out, that is one of the most significant issues facing not just the Government but, frankly, this Committee.
I am sorry. I have a great deal of respect for the Minister but I am afraid that he was unable to answer the major questions that came up today. I do not blame him for that. He did not invent the policy: it was invented in another place and he is doing a good job of defending it. But the fundamental questions are out there unanswered. The noble Lord, Lord Turner, pushed home the consequences of that market failure on high costs and charges and what that does to savers’ incomes, and the fact that, despite the Government's best intentions, pot follows member simply does not contain within it the means for addressing that.
The noble Lord also pointed out the consequence of what happens to savers’ incomes in retirement of not getting that right now. Those effects will run for a long time. I was very grateful for the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham. Given the origins of this Bill, I thought it was a brave and helpful intervention. But the questions that he posed about how pot follows member can deal with old pots and multiple moves are still sitting on the table. It will be interesting to hear whether there is some small movement on auto enrolment pots, but we will still have the issue of significant numbers of dormant small pots.
We still do not have an answer, as my noble friend Lady Drake pointed out, to the problem of people who are leaving the labour market altogether either to become self-employed or simply to leave the labour market. What happens to those pots?
We did not really get an answer as to why, when so much of the Bill is remarkably loose, the Government suddenly get very prescriptive in this area and solely specify PFM on the face of the Bill. As my noble friend Lady Drake pointed out very powerfully, there are some major difficulties of implementation. The Minister is calling for speed and action now. He must know that the barriers to implementation described by my noble friend Lady Drake are such that he is not in a position to press that button now. If he is, he might want to respond to the questions that she posed about the IT challenges, the standardisation challenges, the huge issues of implementation and the need to build consensus across the industry to prioritise savers’ interests. If he feels that the Government have all those cracked, I encourage him to stand up and intervene and tell me now. Otherwise, there is a lot more work to be done. All this amendment is trying to do is to make sure that that work does not abandon the alternative option—which may in the end be the saving of our shared objective—when there is no need to do so at this stage.
I am also concerned about some of the points that the Minister raised in response to there being no single model. I would be very happy to work with the Government to see if we can build consensus around a single model of an aggregator. If that is what the Minister offers, let us work together to try to do that.
The Minister said that there would be more consolidation in pot follows member. Leaving aside for one moment the serious concerns about the judgment made in the impact assessment raised by my noble
friend Lady Drake and the noble Lord, Lord Turner, if pot follows member does not tackle the full range of risks that have been described, then that simply does not answer the question. The Minister again gave an argument that most annuity providers would require a minimum level of pot and the point of decumulation, but again he did not take on the point made by my noble friend Lady Drake, which is that being able to buy in bulk in the market, which an aggregator could do at the point of decumulation, actually opens up whole opportunities in that area.
He made the point about good and bad schemes and that there should not be any bad schemes. I completely agree with him, but there are 200,000 pension schemes in this country. The chances of getting all those up to an optimum level before this is introduced are frankly unrealistic. Given that, the point made by my noble friend Lady Drake stands even more strongly. Even if the Government could guarantee to get all those schemes up to what they would regard as an acceptable minimum standard in the context of the criticism of market failure made by the noble Lord, Lord Turner, and even if they could do that fast, there will still be a significant difference between the best and worst returns. For reasons I will explain in a moment, that seems to be very difficult in the context of auto enrolment.
I was pleased that the Minister managed to find some backing for his scheme from a survey. Did he say that the survey was conducted by the ABI?