I apologise to my noble friend for intervening, but this is a really important issue. The points she makes are absolutely correct and I do not disagree with them—and nor, I think, would noble Lords around the House—but they are beside the point. When we have a new body it is designed to be holistic. At the moment, Pension Wise deals with pensions, so people will not be confused, and the Money Advice Service, or debt advice, deals with debt. We are trying in this Bill, apparently, to bring everything under one roof. The big change that will not have been relevant over the past 30 years or so, is with auto-enrolment, when people come to the new, holistic single body with a debt problem and need someone to help them with their pension, but the person trying to rescale their debts cannot take that into account. It may well be that we have alighted on a problem that extends to the FCA and the regulatory system—that perhaps the FCA is not concerned enough, in the new environment whereby next year or the year after any worker earning more than £10,000 a year will be in a workplace pension, and debt advice needs to be able to consider the question of whether that person should opt out of the workplace pension. Currently, it cannot do so. It could do, but at the moment there is this regulatory hole.
Financial Guidance and Claims Bill [HL]
Proceeding contribution from
Baroness Altmann
(Conservative)
in the House of Lords on Wednesday, 6 September 2017.
It occurred during Committee of the Whole House (HL)
and
Debate on bills on Financial Guidance and Claims Bill [HL].
About this proceeding contribution
Reference
783 c2018 Session
2017-19Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamberSubjects
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Timestamp
2018-04-16 10:55:53 +0100
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