My Lords, I wish to speak briefly to this amendment. I open by paying tribute to my noble friend Lord Davies for the expertise with which he has raised these issues surrounding the cost control element. I look forward to a comprehensive response from the Minister on this difficult issue—that would be to the benefit of the whole Committee.
I particularly ask the Minister to respond to the point made by the cross-party Public Accounts Committee that this is the Treasury’s mistake, yet, in the words of the committee:
“The Treasury now wants pension scheme members to pay the estimated £17 billion cost to put that right.”
I want also to touch on the Government’s response to the consultation on the cost control mechanism, which was published only a few days ago, as my noble friend said. I know that the details of the reforms are to be dealt with in future primary legislation, and I am sure that that will be thoroughly debated at the time, but the response did not give us any information on how the proposed reforms interact with the issues that we are dealing with in the Bill in front of us today. This is essentially the question that my noble friend was asking.
The response said:
“The Government will provide further details on … the extent to which there will be any interaction with the McCloud remedy at future valuations, in due course.”
It seems that, at the same time as we are having complex discussions on the immediate impact of the 2016 valuations on members, there is little or no information about how the Government plan to deal with this issue in the long term.
Clause 80 is welcome, but Ministers will be only too aware that it neither fully answers the concerns of the trade unions over the inclusion of the remedy in the 2016 valuations nor sheds any light on the Government’s intentions for the treatment of the remedy costs in future valuations. I understand that this is a complex matter, and I look forward to the Minister walking us through this complex landscape of issues.