My Lords, I feel to some extent that this is where I came in. I spent the 1970s persuading a number of university colleges to join a decent occupational pension scheme and to leave their insurance-based, extremely poor-value local college schemes. Incidentally, the charges for those poor-value schemes were between 4% and 5%. I was able to persuade people that that was such appalling value that they would be much better off in a different scheme. That is where I think there is a bit of repetition of history. That is not counting, of course, what the investment people took from the scheme; that was just the administration charge. Therefore, I cannot help thinking that in the pensions political world we take one step forward and then sometimes two steps back.
Inertia selling is something that I strongly agree with when it comes to an issue as important as pensions, and we certainly had that in the 1970s. People were joined up to their schemes and they had to take a step to opt out. That was made unlawful by a Conservative Government and it changed the pensions world substantially.
I am sorry if I have a good memory on these things but that is very important when we start off on something that might turn out to be a very good thing, as only history will show whether it is. My fear is that the smaller schemes will have a worse record on governance and compliance. The surveys that are pointed out in the Explanatory Memorandum prove that 24% of small schemes are likely not to conform, compared with 10% of big schemes. So here we go again on this roundabout. I understand that the Government do not want to force schemes together, but there is a logic in pointing out that you get better value for money in the larger schemes.
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I support my noble friend Lady Drake on some of the safeguards that she has been asking for. I have seen insurance companies use every trick in the book when it comes to taking money from pensions. People do
not understand the issue of pensions. When they are young, they do not think it is important, and, as they get older, they are fearful but they do not necessarily understand it. It is an important part of public policy that we should protect people from those who understand money and understand how to take it surreptitiously, where the pension pot ends up being of a scandalous level.
Therefore, this is just a plea that we should be quite humble about some of the things that we do on pensions, as there is no proof whatever that this measure will be successful. The fact that the general issue has all-party agreement is a good thing, but we have a long, hard road to travel before anyone in this Room can say that it has been a success.