Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Bill
Friday 15th July 2022
(2 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Act 2023 Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
This is a simple yet important measure designed to safeguard the interests of pension savers, but before going into the detail about precisely what my Bill would achieve, it may be worth while to provide some context about what pensions dashboards are and the work that the Government are doing to make them a reality. Pensions dashboards are an electronic communications service that will revolutionise the way people interact with their pensions by allowing individuals to see their pensions information, including the state pension, in one place online—at the touch of their laptop, smartphone or tablet. Dashboards will help individuals be reunited with their lost or forgotten pensions, and support people in better planning for their retirement.
An important point to mention is that while users will be able to view their pensions, they will not be able to make transactions, so they would not be able to combine or move pension pots within the dashboard. That is because, in order to introduce dashboards as soon as possible, they will start with a basic level of information, but they will include more detail as our understanding of consumer needs develops. The Government believe that to develop a digital service that is safe, useful and relevant to consumers, future enhancements to dashboards’ functionality should not be decided before the initial offer has been tested with users and any behavioural effects are understood.
Delivering pensions dashboards was a manifesto commitment of this Government, but the idea of a pensions dashboard has received widespread support from Members across the House, and it is not hard to see why. With the success of automatic enrolment, millions more are saving for their retirement and may have multiple pension pots, with no easy way of keeping track of them. Dashboards will bring pensions into the 21st century, and make it as easy for people to review their pensions savings as it is to view their bank accounts on their phones.
The Government are keen to see dashboards available as soon as possible to help consumers plan for their retirement. However, it is important to get the design of the service right to ensure that it is accurate, secure and consumer-focused. Developing a comprehensive service that can cater for the potential 52 million UK adults who could use dashboards, involving data from thousands of pension schemes, is complex and should not be rushed. The Government have, however, made excellent progress to make pensions dashboards a reality. The Money and Pensions Service has established the pensions dashboards programme team to design and implement the digital infrastructure that will make pensions dashboards work. The programme is on track and continues to move forward at pace, with work ongoing on the build of the central digital architecture, and research and testing to feed into the design and development of the service.
Hon. Members may recall our voting at the beginning of this Parliament to pass what is now the Pension Schemes Act 2021, which provided the primary legislative framework to make pensions dashboards possible. The Department for Work and Pensions has since consulted on the draft Pensions Dashboards Regulations 2022, which will apply to relevant occupational pension schemes, and the Government have this week published their response to that consultation. The Financial Conduct Authority has also consulted on equivalent rules for personal and stakeholder pensions to ensure that the information provided on dashboards will be comprehensive.
There will be a dashboard service provided by the Money and Pensions Service, which will launch first. That is because the Government believe very strongly in the importance of a Government-backed, impartial dashboard, and are committed to having the MaPS dashboard available from the start. In addition, it will then be possible for others to enter the market and provide dashboards, which will be bound by requirements set out in regulations and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. That will provide scope for innovation, helping to engage a broad range of users and meet the varied needs of the millions of people with pensions savings. Importantly, individuals will see the same information regardless of which dashboard service they use, and robust rules will be in place to ensure consumers’ interests are at the forefront of all dashboards.
Ensuring that user data is properly secured on the dashboards will be a significant consideration. The Government have taken care to ensure that pensions dashboards and the technology behind them are designed to maximise data security. For example, individuals will always have control over who has access to their data and will be able to revoke access at any time. Only the Money and Pension Service and any qualifying pensions dashboard providers that meet the agreed standards and regulatory requirements will be able to connect to the dashboard infrastructure. The draft regulations will require occupational pension schemes to connect to a central digital architecture that is being developed by the pensions dashboard programme.
Once connected, schemes will be expected to respond to requests by members of the public to find and view their pensions information. To ensure these requirements are adhered to, the regulations will enable the Pensions Regulator to take enforcement action through penalty notices against trustees or managers who fail to comply. That could result in penalties for each breach of £5,000 for individuals or £50,000 if the person is a body corporate, including corporate trustees. This is where my Bill comes in.
Although pensions scheme members may be able to take civil action, nothing currently in legislation prohibits rogue trustees or managers from using a pension scheme’s assets to reimburse themselves to repay fines they incur for breaches of pensions dashboard legislation, which is backed by criminal sanction. This Bill makes changes to pensions legislation to increase protection for savers against the actions of such unscrupulous persons. In particular, it provides additional powers for criminal proceedings to be brought against trustees or managers of occupational pension schemes if they reimburse themselves from pension pots to pay penalties imposed for compliance breaches under the future pensions dashboard regulations. If a trustee or manager is found guilty of this offence, the provisions would allow for a maximum sentence of up to two years in prison or a fine or both.
I should make it clear to the House that this Bill does not impose any new costs or requirements on occupational pension schemes or their sponsoring employers. The intent is simply to deter rogue actors who have already received a financial penalty from the Pensions Regulator under the dashboards regulations from plundering savers’ pension pots to pay the penalty. It is also not something that anyone in the pensions industry should be unfamiliar with. The Bill amends existing legislation that provides for a similar prohibition in several other areas of pensions legislation, including automatic enrolment.
I am delighted that the Bill has the Government’s support, and I look forward to continuing to work with them to secure its passage. As I said at the start, this is an important measure that will safeguard the interests of pension savers from any would-be unscrupulous trustees. I hope we all agree that this Bill would provide worthwhile protection to all of our constituents with pension savings, and I hope that it will be supported on both sides of the House today.
Darren Henry (Broxtowe) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) for bringing forward the Bill, and for allowing me to participate in the debate.
On Third Reading of the Pension Schemes (Conversion of Guaranteed Minimum Pensions) Bill, I stressed the importance of pensions and how they provide a sense of security that individuals can enjoy later in their lifetime. The hope is that a pension will allow us to have economic freedom in our old age. My understanding is that paying into a pension pot, which many see as a long-term savings plan, is becoming more frequent as the years go by. In addition, it seems as if changing jobs has become more frequent in recent times. Those two increases have resulted in an issue: it has become more common for individuals to get the end of their career and not be able to locate all their pension pots with the ease they would have before, and that they would like. Individuals may struggle to find that figure, because they will have moved jobs and therefore paid into lots of different pension pots over their lifetime. That is not to mention the hassle of having to remember which companies they have paid into and having to find their most recent pension statement.
Pensions dashboards will allow people to see online what they have in various pension pots, including their state pension. A dashboard is a great tool because it is convenient to have the relevant information in one place, and it will ensure that pension pots do not get lost. Some people will even be able to track how much money they will have in their pension and realise sooner rather than later the changes they will need to make. That will ensure that they will be able to achieve the desired outcome for their retirement.
Under the current provisions, there will be an issue when dashboards come into force, so we need to make the changes to avoid these brilliant tools being abused by trustees or managers of occupational pension schemes. An occupational pension scheme is set up by an employer to provide retirement benefits to its employees. There is currently nothing to prevent a trustee or manager of an occupational pension scheme from reimbursing themselves from members’ pension pots if they are issued with a financial penalty by the Pensions Regulator for a compliance breach. The Bill seeks to make that exact practice a criminal offence, and that is why I support it.
The bottom line is that we need to protect people’s retirement funds. The maximum penalty for a failure or contravention of the pensions dashboards regulations will be £5,000 for an individual or £50,000 for a body corporate, including corporate trustees. As I have said before, pensions are so important to planning for the future, and I want to make sure that the pensions of the constituents of Broxtowe are safe from the abuse of others. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle on introducing the Bill.
Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) on bringing forward the Bill. The Opposition agree with the principle that pension scheme trustees must be responsible for any failure to meet their legal requirements. The Pensions Regulator has recently warned that many trustees are at risk of failing to meet their legal pensions dashboard responsibilities, and research shows that the majority of trustees have yet to prepare.
Last month, the regulator said:
“Trustees will have legal duties they must be ready for. We will take a dim view of trustees who carelessly fail to prioritise their dashboard responsibilities.”
There is indeed a very real risk that fines could be issued. Without the provisions of the Bill, those fines could fall on scheme members. It should never be the case that mistakes, failures or a lack of action to meet legal requirements on the part of trustees should land with scheme members. People who pay into pensions their whole lives should not be left with less because of the action or inaction of fund managers and trustees. We therefore support this important Bill. In fact, we would have liked to see these provisions in the original pensions dashboard legislation; so although I wish the hon. Member for Cheadle every success with her Bill and commend her for her work, it would be helpful if the Minister told us whether the omission was deliberate on the part of the Government or simply an oversight.
Pensions policy is a long-term policy area. The legislation brought forward in this Parliament and the last Parliament will have implications for many years to come. The Bill is therefore a timely reminder of the need for ongoing work on the pensions dashboard and ongoing work to ensure that people are saving enough for retirement generally and, as the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Darren Henry) says, that they can track and monitor their pension savings and repair problems in their savings history if necessary. We have to ensure financial security for all those who are over state pension age.
I will raise one final point. The dashboard is an important attempt to make information more easily accessible to pension scheme members. We welcome it and think it a helpful way to ensure that people save for retirement, but the Government cannot rely on the programme as a solution for all their pension woes. As a country, we must go further to ensure that more people are saving enough for retirement. If we do not, we will potentially be storing up a future cost of living crisis that will last for decades.
It has been good to hear hon. Members speaking about pension schemes today. I hope that the Bill is a reminder of the importance of well-run, good pension schemes that give people financial security and the confidence to plan for their retirement.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Guy Opperman)
What an honour it is to speak today. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) for having the foresight to move the Second Reading of her Bill and for her excellent contribution to the debate. I can confirm that the Government fully intend to support the Bill today.
As you will be aware, Madam Deputy Speaker, this is my seventh day in the job as Minister for pensions; I hope to be better than my predecessor. The bottom line is that it is an honour to do this job and try to address the genuine issue that the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) raises, which is that we need to get this country saving more. With great respect, we are doing that. The state pension has almost doubled since 2010, thanks to the triple lock and the work of the coalition Government and the Conservative Government: it was worth less than £100 shortly before the 2010 election and is now worth up to £185-plus. As taxpayers, we are paying out well over £100 billion to our pensioners. We are providing huge amounts of support.
Automatic enrolment has been a massive success story under successive Governments. The simple truth is that automatic enrolment has meant constituents up and down the country saving in a way that never happened before. The proportion of young people saving with a workplace pension was less than 30% prior to 2012; it is now above 80%. For women with pension savings in a workplace context, the figure was less than 42%; it is now above 80% as well. These are transformational things. For example, in your constituency of Epping Forest, Madam Deputy Speaker, 13,000 people are now saving for a workplace pension. The Bill will genuinely help them to navigate things an awful lot better, so I am very pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle has introduced it.
Dean Russell (Watford) (Con)
The pensions dashboard is incredibly important and my constituents will probably be asking what it means for them. I am also very conscious that we have a digital divide; I have been campaigning for online accessibility for probably 20 years. I would be interested to know, first, how we can ensure that we do not put people in a position where they cannot get the information, and secondly what the roll-out means for Watford.
Guy Opperman
It matters tremendously to Watford, and I will tell my hon. Friend why: in Watford, 45,000 constituents are benefiting from a workplace pension under automatic enrolment. That is a transformational thing that was genuinely not there barely 10 years ago.
We all support the pensions industry, but it has basically been existing in the 19th century. With the pensions dashboard, we have jumped over the entire 20th century and into the 21st by bringing things online. The pensions dashboard will take pensions—all 40,000 schemes up and down the country in the private and public sector and the state pension—and make them all accessible via iPads, mobile phones and computers. That is transformational.
I am old enough to have met my bank manager—a person whom I used to go and see and have a conversation with. That never happens any more, yet, with the banking and savings apps that many of us now have, the way we engage with our bank is transformational compared with days gone by. We hope that people will have a pensions app so that, as they take the bus or train to work, they can look at their bank account, their savings account and their pensions at the same time and move money between them.
This process started under the Pension Schemes Act 2021, which genuinely transformed the digital divide. The 20-year campaign of my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell), both outside and inside Parliament, is seeing the fruits of his labours. This will make our lives easier, putting it bluntly, because we will have accessible information on an ongoing basis. It will make things simpler by enabling us to make decisions as consumers in a way we never have before, and it will make things better by providing a greater understanding of how to control our money. Surely that is something for which we all strive.
The Government support this Bill, and it is an honour to be here on a day when the House has taken forward four Bills, including the Shark Fins Bill, the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Bill and the Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Bill, which is particularly relevant to my good self as I have suffered loss. I listened to those debates with great interest, and I totally support the Bills.
This Bill is of great importance as we seek to make pensions safer, better and greener. As the hon. Member for Cheadle indicated, with record numbers of people saving for retirement it is more important than ever that people understand their pensions information and prepare for financial security in later life. Dashboards will unquestionably make people do that.
The Department for Work and Pensions published a consultation on the draft pensions dashboard regulations earlier this year, and only yesterday we published the response to that consultation, setting out in detail that we are fully committed to driving forward pensions dashboards and making them happen at the earliest opportunity.
The Bill will increase protections for pension savers by prohibiting trustees and managers of occupational and personal pension schemes from being reimbursed out of scheme assets in respect of penalties imposed on them by any future dashboard regulations. The Bill will achieve this by amending section 256 of the Pensions Act 2004, under which, if a trustee or manager were to be reimbursed and knew or had reasonable grounds to believe that they had been so reimbursed, they would be guilty of a criminal offence unless they had taken all reasonable steps to prevent it. For those found guilty, the provisions allow for a maximum sentence of up to two years in prison or a fine, or both.
Additionally, were any amount to be paid out of a scheme’s assets in such a way, the Pensions Regulator would have the power to issue civil penalties to any trustee or manager who failed to take all reasonable steps to secure compliance. Section 256 of the 2004 Act already prohibits reimbursement of penalties issued under a number of other pieces of pensions legislation, including automatic enrolment. We therefore consider the proposed amendment to that Act to be a very logical and welcome change.
My hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Darren Henry) is a fantastic champion for his constituency, for which I thank him. He has spoken repeatedly in this House of the importance of pensions to his constituents, and I can tell him that 29,000 of his constituents have been automatically enrolled into a workplace pension. This is of massive importance to his constituents.
My hon. Friend raised two points that I will briefly address. First, we are talking about a significant number of pensions, because the average person will have several pots as they continue to work. They might have a job at the age of 18, 21, 24 or 26 before moving to another job. The dashboard starts out as a tracing service, as we have discussed. We already have the Pension Tracing Service, which allows people to seek and identify any lost pensions, but the dashboard will take that so much further. Individuals will be able to access in a safe way all their pensions, make decisions on consolidation and consider their options and possible outcomes in a way that they never could before. This is proper, modern, Conservative, consumer-focused politics that is genuinely transformational for the British people. I am so pleased that my hon. Friend supports that. It is important for his constituents that we support them, not just with workplace pensions.
As I outlined earlier, the support through the state pension has doubled effectively over the past 12 years. The Government are also bringing forward other support, whether it is the specific cost of living support that landed in a million of our constituents’ accounts—£326, and there will be £324 later this year—or whether it is the extra £300 in winter fuel payments for all our pensioner constituents, or the £400 that will go to households that are registered as recipients of energy, along with the energy support grant that will land in October and November. All those packages will be there to support constituents as they cope with the difficulties that have been caused fundamentally by the war in Ukraine and the energy war that we are effectively engaged in with Putin.
Dean Russell
I appreciate my hon. Friend sharing the updates on the pension and how it is helping my constituents. Whenever I speak to pensioners, they always mention the triple lock. Will he commit to the triple lock please?
Guy Opperman
I assure my hon. Friend that the triple lock will return this autumn, when legislation is brought back, as it has been every year, in the pensions uprating process. That is something that not just I but my right hon. Friends the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions have said, and it remains Government policy. My hon. Friend raises support for pensioners. I pray in aid and urge all colleagues on both sides of the House to get behind spreading awareness of pension credit. Most pensioner support is automatically provided. In other words, once someone is registered, upratings and the inclusion of greater sums such as the £300 winter fuel payment and the £400 energy support grant happen automatically. The key thing with pension credit is that you have to apply. So the message is, “Please don’t be shy, please apply.”
I was lucky enough to spend some time with Mr Len Goodman, to whom I am deeply grateful for his contributions. Fortunately there was no dancing by me, but the video that has been seen by more than 1 million people makes the case for pension credit. It is worth on average £3,300 to all our constituents who are vulnerable and have not claimed. That is something of great importance. We know that up and down the country, in every single constituency, there are hundreds of pensioners who have failed to claim pension credit. I urge them to contact their local citizens advice bureau, Christians Against Poverty, or other assistance organisation such as Age UK or others, for help to claim. They can also go to gov.uk or dial freephone 0800 991234. It applies across all communities. Yesterday I visited Punjabi Radio; we particularly want to reach BME communities.
In respect of the Bill, the Government are committed to making pensions safer, better and greener. We genuinely believe that the Bill makes pensions better through the pensions dashboard. The safety element is assisted by this small, discrete but very important Bill. We also have the capability to make pensions greener. We are the first country to bring in TCFD—the taskforce on climate-related financial disclosures. We are driving forward environmental, social and governance standards. Only today we issued our response to the call for evidence on the social element of ESG. Again, it is a world first for a country to look at this particular reform. Without a shadow of a doubt, the Bill will improve our ability to provide a proper deterrent which will prevent rogue trustees or managers from exploiting the pension assets for which they are responsible. The Government will therefore support the Bill’s passage through Parliament, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle—who is a doughty campaigner for her constituents —on ensuring that pensions are safer for the future.
Mary Robinson
With the leave of the House, Madam Deputy Speaker, I thank all Members for their contributions and for being present for this important debate. Let me begin my thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Darren Henry), who rightly described the pensions dashboards as brilliant, and acknowledged their potential to enable people to find the various pension pots that they may have acquired during their working lives. So many people who have lost or forgotten pensions and simply do not know where to go will be helped by this groundbreaking legislation.
I thank the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) for her support: she was right to recognise the importance of good, well-run pension schemes. I thank the Minister for his support, and I thank the DWP officials for their assistance in preparing the Bill and for helping me to present it to the House today.
As we move forward with the pensions dashboard, I am glad that we can also put in place the provisions that we will need to protect hard-working people and their savings. The Bill is intended to safeguard people’s pension savings, and I hope it will be able to progress with the support of the whole House.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read a Second time; to stand committed to a Public Bill Committee (Standing Order No. 63).
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) on achieving a Second Reading for her excellent Bill.
Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Bill
Wednesday 26th October 2022
(2 years, 1 month ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Act 2023 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Chair
I have a few preliminary reminders for the Committee. Please switch electronic devices to silent. No food or drinks are permitted during sittings except for the water provided. Hansard colleagues would be grateful if Members could email their speaking notes to hansardnotes@parliament.uk. My selection and grouping for today’s meeting is available online and in the room. No amendments have been tabled, and we will have a single debate on both clauses in the Bill.
Clause 1
No indemnification for penalties under pensions dashboards regulations
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma. I am grateful to you and to Committee members for joining me to look at the detail of the Bill. I am particularly pleased to be joined this morning on the Committee by my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham, who in his many years as Pensions Minister played a pivotal role in the introduction of the pensions dashboard, and has supported the Bill from its inception.
This is a simple Bill with just two clauses, but its purpose is to safeguard the interests of pension savers, which I think we can all agree is an important and worthy cause. The need for the Bill arises from the fact that there is currently nothing in legislation backed by a criminal sanction that specifically prohibits rogue trustees or managers from using a pension scheme’s assets to reimburse themselves and to repay civil penalties that they incur for breaches of pensions dashboard legislation. The Bill addresses that problem. It is welcome to have not just Government support for the Bill but, I hope, support from Members on both sides of the Committee. I noted that on Second Reading the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) said:
“It should never be the case that mistakes, failures or a lack of action to meet legal requirements on the part of trustees should land with scheme members.”—[Official Report, 15 July 2022; Vol. 718, c. 659.]
I agree wholeheartedly with that point, which explains in a nutshell why I introduced the Bill.
Before going on to the specific detail of the Bill, it is worth briefly recapping some of the broader context about what pensions dashboards are, and the work that the Government are doing to make them a reality. Pensions dashboards are an electronic communication service that will allow individuals to see their pensions information, including the state pension, in one place online. With the continued success of automatic enrolment, millions more are saving for their retirement, and so may have multiple pension pots with no easy way of keeping track of them. Dashboards will help individuals to be reunited with lost and forgotten pensions. They will also support people in better planning for their retirement, making it possible for people to review their pensions savings online in the same way that people might currently view their bank accounts, whether on their phone or laptop at home.
There will be an online dashboard provided by the Money and Pensions Service. Additionally, to help to cater for the varied needs of the millions of people with pensions savings, it will also be possible for other organisations to provide dashboard services. Those organisations will be regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, which will soon consult on a regulatory framework and rules for pensions dashboard operators. Individuals will see the same information regardless of which dashboard they use.
Importantly, the technology behind pensions dashboards has been designed with the security of data at its heart. Crucially, pensions information is not stored in any central database. It will continue to be held only by the pensions schemes themselves or by a third party administering the data on their behalf, and will be displayed only at the request of the individual. Individuals will always have control over who has access to their data and will be able to revoke access at any time.
I know that the Government are committed to ensuring that pensions dashboards become a reality as soon as possible. Even since I spoke on Second Reading of the Bill in July, much progress has been made. Only last week, the Pensions Dashboards Regulations 2022 were laid before Parliament and will be the subject of affirmative debates in due course. That is a huge milestone, because those regulations will require trustees and managers of occupational pension schemes to connect their schemes to the pensions dashboards digital architecture and provide information on request. I understand that the Financial Conduct Authority expects to confirm the final rules for personal and stakeholder pensions in the near future.
In the event of non-compliance with any of the requirements in part 3 of the Pensions Dashboards Regulations, the Pensions Regulator may, at their discretion, issue compliance notices, third party compliance notices and penalty notices. If the regulator chooses to issue a financial penalty, that can be up to a maximum of £5,000 in the case of an individual or up to £50,000 in other cases, such as corporate trustees.
That brings me neatly back to the contents of the Bill. Despite amounting to just two short subsections, clause 1 provides the real substance of the Bill. Committee members will see that subsection (1) simply adds section 238G of the Pensions Act 2004 to the list of statutory provisions in section 256(1)(b) of that Act. Section 256 of the Pensions Act 2004 prohibits any amount being paid out of the assets of an occupational or personal pension scheme for the purpose of reimbursing, or providing for the reimbursement of, any trustee or manager of the scheme in respect of a penalty they are required to pay under specific pensions legislation.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
There may be some people listening to this debate who are unpaid trustees of pension funds and are concerned that these provisions will give them a huge potential liability. Will my hon. Friend confirm that many pension schemes have indemnity policies arranged through insurance companies, which will prevent that from happening, and this legislation will enforce the obligation on managers and trustees to ensure that the pensions dashboard is implemented?
Mary Robinson
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, because he is exactly right. It is worth reinforcing that we know that the overwhelming majority of people who take on the role of trustee want to do the best thing in the right way. This legislation reflects what is already in law, to ensure that financial penalties cannot be reimbursed from pension funds. It is important that we protect those savers’ pension pots.
Section 238 of the Pensions Act 2004 relates to the compliance provisions for pensions dashboards. The Bill extends an existing prohibition set out in section 256 of the Pensions Act to include penalties under the compliance provisions in the Pensions Dashboards Regulations and future regulations made under section 238G of the 2004 Act. As a result, if a trustee or a manager were to be reimbursed out of the assets of a pension scheme for a penalty issued under the Pensions Dashboards Regulations and knew or had reasonable grounds to believe they had been so reimbursed, they would be guilty of an offence, unless they had taken all reasonable steps to ensure that they were not so reimbursed, as I have said—that is so important that it was worth saying twice. On successful prosecution, that person would be liable to receive a sentence of up to two years in prison or a fine or both. Additionally, were any amount to be paid out of the scheme’s assets in contravention of this provision, the Pensions Regulator would have the power to issue civil penalties to any trustee or manager who failed to take reasonable steps to secure compliance.
Clause 1(2) makes a similar amendment to article 233 of the Pensions (Northern Ireland) Order 2005, essentially replicating the change that I have just described, so that the same prohibition on reimbursement using the assets of a pension scheme would also apply in Northern Ireland. It is entirely sensible to ensure that relevant pension members across the whole of the United Kingdom can benefit from the safeguards that the Bill provides.
Clause 2 sets out vital but standard information on how clause 1 is to be brought into legal effect, and the territorial extent of the two subsections in clause 1. The Bill has been drafted so that its respective protections extend to England, Wales and Scotland by virtue of amendments to the Pensions Act 2004, and to Northern Ireland by virtue of amendments to parallel legislation in Northern Ireland.
On commencement, clause 2 allows the Secretary of State to make regulations by statutory instrument to appoint a day for commencement in England, Wales and Scotland. It also enables the Department for Communities in Northern Ireland to make an order, by statutory rule, to appoint a day for commencement in Northern Ireland. That provides flexibility for the provisions to be brought into force at an appropriate time.
This is an important measure that will safeguard the interests of pension savers from any would-be unscrupulous trustees. On Second Reading, the Bill received cross-party support, and I hope it will continue to do so today.
Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)
Mr Sharma, I am not the Labour Front Bencher on this Bill.
Nick Smith
I will ask some questions later of the Conservative Minister, if that is okay.
Maggie Throup (Erewash) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle on successfully navigating this short but important Bill to Committee. I should start by declaring an interest: I am one of the few people in this room likely to benefit from the Bill sooner rather than later. [Laughter.] I know that does not seem likely, but there we are.
This is a simple Bill that strengthens the pensions dashboard regulations. I will focus on clause 1, which I fully support. When the pensions dashboard regulations come into force, the pensions regulator may take enforcement action, which could include a financial penalty, if a trustee or manager of an occupational pension scheme fails to comply with the regulations. When that occurs, there is nothing in legislation to prevent them from reimbursing themselves from the assets of the pension scheme.
The provisions in the Bill will make it a criminal offence for pension scheme trustees or managers to reimburse themselves using the assets of the pension scheme in respect of the penalties imposed under dashboard regulations. It achieves that by amending section 256(1)(b) of the Pensions Act 2004. I am sure that we have all had surgery cases where constituents feel, for a variety of reasons, that they are not getting their expected pension due to inappropriate use of funds. I am sure that this Bill will go a long way to addressing those concerns.
The part of the explanatory notes detailing the impact assessment quite rightly indicates that there may be some indirect benefits of the Bill, as it should help to reassure pension savers that protections are in place to deter unscrupulous trustees or managers, therefore providing greater confidence to save for a pension, protecting our financial futures. In conclusion, I am sure that my Erewash residents will welcome the measures in the Bill, so I am delighted to support clauses 1 and 2 as they stand.
Richard Graham
As a trustee of the parliamentary pension scheme, I should declare a relevant interest. Today is a great moment to congratulate two colleagues. The work on creating the pensions dashboard was done by my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham. I think we all recognise what a great job he did on that as Parliament’s longest-serving pensions Minister. It is also right that we all congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle, who has taken this forward, building on the work done by my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham, to create surely one of the shortest and least contentious Bills that this House has ever had to deal with. I am sure that the Minister will say something similar in due course.
Ensuring that trustees and managers do not effectively raid a pension fund, other people’s assets, effectively, to deal with their own errors—advertent or inadvertent; as my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle said, most instances will be inadvertent—is absolutely right and proper. This just sensibly fills a gap. The business of insurance indemnification for trustees against inadvertent mistakes will also be reassuring to those who volunteer as trustees almost always completely free of charge. On that basis, there is a huge amount to appreciate and support in this short Bill.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Alex Burghart)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma. I hope Committee members will forgive me if I keep my remarks relatively short; as they will be able to hear, I am losing my voice. This is my first speech as Minister for Pensions and Growth, and it may be my last. If I survive the day in post, I will have two further speeches to give, and I would like to have the voice to give them.
Luckily, my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle has said just about everything that there is to say about this excellent and uncontentious Bill, which strengthens the great work that my venerable predecessor, the hon. Member for Hexham, did in his five years in office. It is fair to say that under him and his predecessors, a veritable quiet revolution in pensions has been taking place, to the benefit of tens of millions of people.
The revolution began with auto-enrolment, which, I am pleased to say, celebrates its 10th birthday today. It is difficult to overstate the success of auto-enrolment: it is one of the greatest examples of nudge theory ever seen in public policy. New figures released today show that, in the 10 years that auto-enrolment has been in place, the number of employees participating in workplace pensions has increased from 10.7 million to 20 million, which is an increase of 86%—a truly remarkable achievement. Last year alone, British people saved nearly £115 billion into workplace pensions and pension pots—a 40% increase on where we were before auto-enrolment.
The pensions dashboard is the next step in that revolution. If the first job was to help people to save, the second is to help them to understand what they are saving. We believe that that will create a further nudge of its own, as people understand what they have accumulated in their pots throughout their working life, and what they can expect to have in their retirement. This Government are helping more people to save more so that they can do more in their retirement years. I am very proud to support the latest chapter in that work today.
Nick Smith
I congratulate the hon. Member for Cheadle on introducing this important Bill, and I join the Minister in recognising the fantastic success of auto-enrolment, which has changed saving across our country. But I hope the Minister can help me on two points.
First, the hon. Member for Hexham has—for sure—done all the heavy lifting on introducing the pensions dashboard, but when does the Minister anticipate its proper introduction to the marketplace to support pensioners across the country? It is a great idea, but it has been in development for a long time. Secondly, I note that there is no impact assessment or consultation on the introduction of the Bill. I am sure that there are fair reasons for that, but have the FCA and the other regulators involved had any input on the development of the Bill?
Alex Burghart
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. We expect that, during the course of next year, all the requisite data will be pulled together from pension funds and assembled on the dashboard, and that the public will have access to it for the first time in the middle of 2024. As he says, it is major work, and it is important that we get it right. Through the passage of legislation such as this Bill, we will be able to ensure that our pensions system and dashboard are fit for the future. This is a major change, involving a great deal of work by a huge number of outfits, and it will make a major difference to the way people see and participate in the world of pensions.
The hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent had a further question about the FCA. Based on information gathered by sample providers, the regulatory impact assessment considers the costs of all relevant pension schemes and providers in scope of dashboards, connecting to the dashboard digital architecture and supplying pensions information. Although FCA-regulated personal and stakeholder schemes fall outside the scope of Department for Work and Pensions regulation, the Pension Schemes Act 2021 requires the FCA to make corresponding rules covering the requirements of these schemes in relation to pensions dashboards. Therefore, the impact assessment takes into account the costs for both these providers and the occupation scheme trustees.
I turn to the detail of the Bill. Clause 1, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle said, will prohibit trustees and managers of occupational personal pension schemes from being reimbursed out of scheme assets in respect of penalties imposed on them for non-compliance with the pension dashboard regulations. That is obviously an important safeguard for pensions savers. It is achieved by amending section 256 of the Pensions Act 2004, under which if a trustee or manager were to be reimbursed or knew or had reasonable grounds to believe they had been so reimbursed, they would be guilty of a criminal offence, unless they had taken all reasonable steps to ensure they were not so reimbursed. We are talking about a serious crime. The provisions will allow for a maximum sentence of up to two years in prison or a fine or both.
Additionally, were any amount to be paid out of a pension scheme’s assets in such a way, the pensions regulator would have the power to issue civil penalties to any trustee or manager who failed to take all reasonable steps to secure compliance. Section 256 of the 2004 Act already prohibits reimbursement of penalties issued under a number of other pieces of pensions legislation, so the proposed amendment to the 2004 Act is a logical change that the Government welcome.
Clause 1 also makes corresponding changes to article 233 of the Pensions (Northern Ireland) Order 2005. As hon. Members know, all aspects of pensions policy are transferred to the Northern Ireland Assembly; however, there is a convention that the pensions legislation made in Northern Ireland stays in lockstep with that of England, Wales and Scotland, to ensure parity across the whole United Kingdom. The usual procedure in the instance of Parliament making provision of a transferred policy area would be to obtain a legislative consent motion from the Northern Ireland Assembly.
However, as hon. Members will be aware, the Assembly has thus far failed to elect a Speaker, so it is not in a position to grant this consent. I am pleased to say that Deirdre Hargey MLA, Minister for Communities in Northern Ireland, has written to the Department for Work and Pensions and confirmed that she would, in principle, be content to seek agreement for the provisions in the Bill to extend to Northern Ireland. That was, however, conditional on the agreement of a functioning Executive, but there will be further opportunity for this issue to be considered by the Assembly if the current impasse in Northern Ireland is resolved before the Bill has completed its journey through Parliament.
Clause 2, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle stated earlier, sets out the standard information needed for all Bills and includes detail of how provisions will come into force and their territorial extent. The Government are committed to protecting pensions savers and agree that the safeguards in the Bill provide a welcome deterrent against rogue trustees or managers exploiting pension assets for which they are responsible. We commend the Bill to the Committee.
Mary Robinson
I thank the Minister for his remarks and am pleased his voice held out. I thank all Members here for their support, in particular the Minister, who has had a short time to become familiar with this subject. I also thank the officials for their invaluable support over the past few months. I thank my colleagues for their contributions and for being here to support the Bill.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash said, this is about protecting our financial futures, and it is a very worthy cause. It is important for the up to 52 million people the Bill will cater for. My hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester rightly pays tribute to the former Minister for Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham, who has done so much over the years and has been pivotal in everything he has brought to this place.
Alex Burghart
I am worried that I did not pay fulsome enough tribute to my predecessor in my speech. Stepping into a large brief such as this is a daunting exercise, but to have handed over to me such a well-ordered series of policies and such a clear sense of direction is a testament to the work he did over five years. As my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester said earlier, there have probably been no Ministers who have held the brief for so long or have done so much to contribute to this essential part of the way we support citizens in later life.
Mary Robinson
I am grateful to the Minister, as I know everyone here will be. He has succinctly echoed all our thoughts. My hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester also said he thought it was the shortest and least contentious of Bills, but I hope it is one of great importance to millions of pension savers. I commend the Bill to the Committee.
Clause 1 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 2 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Bill to be reported, without amendment.
Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Bill
Friday 20th January 2023
(1 year, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Act 2023 Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Third time.
The Bill is a simple yet important measure designed to safeguard the interests of pensions savers. It will help to ensure that unscrupulous trustees or managers of pensions schemes do not help themselves to the hard-earned savings of pension scheme members to reimburse themselves for penalties incurred under the pensions dashboard regulations. I am proud to have brought the Bill before the House and delighted to have received support from the Government for it. I am proud to have brought the Bill before the House and I am delighted to have received support from the Government for it, confirmed by the Minister for Employment, my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) on Second Reading and reconfirmed by the then Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) in Committee. I thank them both profusely for their support.
I welcome the new Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott) the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for pensions and financial inclusion, to her place and hope that she will confirm that I have a hat-trick of support from pensions Ministers. The cross-party support throughout the passage of the Bill was also extremely welcome, and I hope that that will continue.
For the benefit of those that were not present for the previous stages of the Bill, I will give a brief recap of its policy background and purpose. Millions more people are now saving for retirement, thanks to the success of automatic enrolment, but as people change job roles throughout their career it can become difficult to keep track of multiple pension pots. Likewise, when people move home, updating their addresses with various pension schemes is not always the top priority, so pension schemes might not have up-to-date contact details for many of their members.
We know that many people have little idea how much they have saved for retirement. Pensions dashboards are an electronic communication service that will help to solve those problems. They will revolutionise the way people interact with their pensions by allowing individuals to see pensions information online, including the state pension, in one place, at the touch of their laptop, smartphone, or tablet. Dashboards will help to reunite individuals with their lost or forgotten pensions and support people in better planning for their retirement.
The Money and Pensions Service, an arm’s length body of the Department for Work and Pensions, will provide a dashboard service. Additionally, to help to cater for the varied needs of the millions of people with pensions savings, it will also be possible for other organisations to provide dashboard services. Those organisations will be regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, which is currently consulting on rules for pension dashboard operators.
Importantly, the technology behind pensions dashboards has been designed with data security at its heart. Pensions information will not be stored in any central database and will continue to be held only by the pension schemes themselves, or by a third party administering the data on their behalf. Pensions information will only be displayed at the request of the individual. Individuals will retain control over who has access to their data, and will be able to revoke that access at any time.
Following parliamentary approval in November last year, the pensions dashboard regulations came into force on 12 December. The regulations set out requirements for occupational pension schemes to be connected to a digital ecosystem, which will enable the provision of pensions information at the request of a pension scheme member. In the event that trustees or managers do not comply with the requirements of the pensions dashboard regulations, there are powers for the pensions regulator to take enforcement action, including the power to issue penalty notices. Those penalty notices could be up to £5,000 for each breach in the case of individuals, or up to £50,000 in other cases, such as corporate trustees.
However, there is nothing currently in legislation to prohibit trustees or managers from being reimbursed for those penalties using the assets of the pension scheme. It is certainly not right in my view that ordinary pension scheme members should have to foot the bill for failures by trustees to meet the legal requirements.
Simon Baynes (Clwyd South) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend clarify whether the dashboards have come into reality yet, or is it just that the regulations are in place and we expect the dashboards to become a reality shortly?
Mary Robinson
I thank my hon. Friend for that question. I share his eagerness for the dashboards to be put in place. The regulations are there and the building of the digital ecosystem has been happening. One key part is that the dashboards must be secure, and that is complex. The expectation is that, from 1 April, pension schemes will be able to and be expected to start to connect with the dashboard system, and their ability to do that will run through until, I believe, October 2025. The Minister will clarify those points. I share his enthusiasm, and we want to get the dashboards going as soon as possible.
I am pleased to say that the problems I have highlighted are being solved and addressed by the Bill. It provides powers for criminal proceedings to be brought against trustees or managers of occupational pension schemes if they reimburse themselves from pension pots to pay penalties imposed for compliance breaches under the dashboard regulations. If a trustee or a manager is found guilty of that offence, the provisions would allow for a maximum sentence of up to two years in prison, a fine, or both.
As I said on Second Reading, the Bill does not impose any new costs or requirements on occupational pension schemes or their sponsoring employers. Section 256 of the Pensions Act 2004 already prohibits reimbursement for penalties incurred under a number of other areas of pension legislation. The Bill will simply extend that prohibition to include pensions dashboards. I hope we can all agree that this is an uncontentious measure that is worthy of our support. I look forward to its making progress through the other House.
Simon Baynes (Clwyd South) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) for bringing the Bill before the House. As with other Bills that we have considered today, it is astonishing that its requirements even need to be made—pension trustees or managers using scheme assets to reimburse themselves and repay civil penalties is, in any situation, an extraordinary concept. The Bill will be righting a potential wrong, which is extremely important.
Before I came to this place, my background was in the financial services industry. When I was a county councillor in Powys, I was a member of the pensions and investment committee. I have also had considerable experience of acting as a trustee to various charities, overseeing their financial affairs. So, from my point of view, this is a subject of particular interest.
My hon. Friend made the vital point about how pension dashboards, as an electronic communication service, will allow individuals to see their pensions information—including their state pension—in one place online. I am pleased to hear that we are not far off pension schemes being connected to the technology—that is from 1 April—and that they will have until October 2025 to be, I presume, fully up and running. Anything that can be introduced that demystifies the pension world and makes information more accessible to people is vital.
My hon. Friend made two other points about the dashboards, one of which was about uniting people with lost pensions. That might sound peculiar to some, but those who have been in different employments will have been members of different pension schemes and companies—parents may have set up a pension for them—and so on. That is therefore a much more important point than it might appear at first sight.
My hon. Friend’s second point was about better help in retirement in general. At a time when inflation and interest rates are high, and the cost of living is difficult for people, the pensions issue could not be more important. With prices going up sharply, anything that we can do to help people in retirement on a static income, or an income that is not growing much, is vital.
I am delighted that the pensions Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott), is present; she is a true champion of the pensions industry and an expert on the subject. I have heard her speak on the subject on several occasions. The point of my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle about automatic enrolment is extremely pertinent, because the whole pensions industry has been transformed in recent years, particularly under the Conservative Government, so more people are involved in it. The ability to have pensions dashboards as an electronic communication is therefore vital.
To go back to my original point, it is extraordinary that there is nothing in legislation, backed by a criminal sanction, to prohibit the trustees or managers from drawing on and reimbursing themselves from the pension schemes. As somebody who was involved in that industry, one way or another, for a long time, I could not imagine being on a board of trustees where anybody would ever consider doing that, but clearly it does happen. My hon. Friend’s point is that those are, potentially, substantial amounts of money. The financial penalty under the current non-compliance requirements in part 4 of the Pensions Dashboards Regulations 2022 is up to a maximum of £5,000 in the case of an individual or £50,000 in other cases, such as corporate trustees. So if those were to be reimbursed from the schemes, they would be substantial subtractions.
Mary Robinson
My hon. Friend is right to say that it is important that a trustee should not be able reimburse themselves from the scheme for any wrongdoing under any pensions legislation. In fact, under the Pensions Act 2004, some of those regulations are already in place. It appears from the Pensions Regulator that, until now, prosecutions and penalties have not been issued; I am sure that the Minister will want to clarify that. This is very much about having a deterrent when the dashboard is set up. The deterrent effect needs to be strong to ensure that those people, whose pensions are in the schemes and on the dashboard, are properly protected.
Simon Baynes
I thank my hon. Friend for that clarification. Indeed, the deterrent is vital, not only to ensure that the trustees and managers do not take that course of action, but to give a general sense of confidence in the schemes to everybody who contributes to them. As I said, I am very impressed by my hon. Friend for promoting the Bill, which has my wholehearted support as a Member of Parliament and as somebody with considerable experience of the industry. It is high time that we passed the measure.
Dean Russell (Watford) (Con)
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Simon Baynes), who always speaks eloquently and with grace about his insight and experience, which he brought to bear in his speech. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson), who is an incredibly passionate campaigner on this and other topics. It does not surprise me that the Bill has made it to Third Reading, given her experience and her ability to convince others about quite complex issues in such a way that makes sense and brings people along.
I will speak briefly about the Bill’s importance from the perspective of pensions and of transparency and the use of data. Although the Bill is specifically about the prohibition of indemnification, the words in it and the pensions dashboards are absolutely key. We are now surrounded by a world of data, and there are so many complex ways in which our data is used and accessed. Whether it is marketing information on Facebook or a pensions dashboard, it is ultimately information about us and our lives. We are being analysed, reviewed, logged and filed in databases all around the world.
We all hope to get to pensionable age, reflecting and relaxing after a hard-working life, and our pensions will be important. Knowing everything we can about what our pensions will look like, and about what information is stored, protects us from wrongdoing and allows us to plan ahead. That is absolutely key.
During the covid pandemic, we increasingly used dashboards to explain complex information in a simple, effective way. We all remember the sad days of covid, when Professor Whitty, Sir Patrick Vallance or whoever stood up at the daily briefings to go through the charts and to explain what the graphs and information meant for what we could do and what we might plan to do. The pensions dashboard is not dissimilar. It is just data on our lives, showing what contribution we are making, what contribution we will be able to make and what we will get back in future.
This goes to the heart of what government should be about. It should not be about imposing rules. As a Conservative, I think we should have a small-state Government, but they should support people to know what is available and what opportunities they have. They should also support people through welfare, where needed, so there is a safety net to help them live the best life they can.
Pensionable age is often one of the points at which people need support from the Government. Anything they do not know about their state pension contributions could inhibit their ability to live a full and joyful life. Being able to understand the data, and being able to access a dashboard that tells us what our future pension may look like given our contributions, is key.
Also, pensioners want to know that everything they have put into their pension is available to use. The stories of organisations or individuals taking some of that money away from pensioners are not only abhorrent and wrong; it is a failing that they are able to do it off the radar, without sharing the information. I wholeheartedly support this Bill and the wider approach of having a pensions dashboard. The more data-literate we can be, and the simpler we can be in telling people what is available and accessible to them, the better the world will be.
More broadly, this ties into the important role data will have in health. I will not talk about this too much, but I am a great believer in having a single patient view within the NHS and within Government, so that we are able to access our information to see what it means for us. The state could then use that information to improve its services and to connect the dots between different systems while ensuring there is a seamless approach to everything it does.
The challenge is that, because data and technology have grown in a fragmented way within Government and society, there are lots of small bits of data and small systems out there that do not talk to each other. The pensions dashboard is a great way to show that the Government are connecting those dots. I just hope we do that more across other parts of Government and other parts of our lives so that we have a simple view of what the future will look like.
I commend this Bill, and I truly thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle for her work to get it this far.
Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) for bringing forward this important Bill.
As a member of the Work and Pensions Committee, I suspect that I spend more time thinking about pensions than many. Trust in pensions is key to ensuring that people engage with saving for later life and adequately prepare for their old age. A Which? survey found that only 23% of people trust long-term financial products such as pensions. The Bill will strengthen people’s trust in the new pensions dashboards and ensure that people feel safe to engage with this useful new tool and gain a greater understanding of their pension.
Pensions dashboards are hoped to be a game-changer for engagement with pension pots and financial literacy when it comes to retirement plans. It is not new that we have poor financial literacy in the UK. Many people do not take advantage of the range of savings and investment products available to them because of a mix of a lack of trust and a lack of education about the benefits. As a former maths teacher, I put on the record my full support for our Prime Minister’s ambition for everyone to study maths to the age of 18, although I very much hope that it will be the practical, day-to-day mathematics that tackles the challenges of compound interest, debt management and, indeed, pensions.
People see pensions as something shrouded in mystery. The lack of literacy around pensions is exacerbated by their constantly being put at the bottom of people’s priority lists. Understandably, people are primarily focused on day-to-day spending, clearing debts, saving for homes and other big expenses and caring for family members. However, we all know that the earlier people engage with pensions, the more they can save and the greater the benefits.
Since 2012 , the Government’s automatic workplace enrolment scheme has proved very successful and ensures that younger people, who are likely not to be thinking of their retirement 40 or so years in the future, are saving from an early point. Although more people are saving through the scheme, it also creates a sense of security and that they do not need to engage with their pensions as they are already providing for their future. Such over-optimism in respect of their savings prevents people from engaging in the time-consuming process of consolidating pensions. These days, people change jobs with much more frequency and accrue lots of small pots. During the summer recess, when I had a little time on my hands, I thought I would try to consolidate my pensions; to date, I have not successfully consolidated a single pension, despite three of them relating to my work in this House.
By making pension savings more transparent, we will give people a clearer idea of their existing situation. They can then make informed decisions about where they put their money. Since covid-19, more and more of our population are confident in the use of online tools in place of physical access to banks. In fact, 23% of British people use Google as their first port of call for financial information, while 16% say they use social media such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as their source.
Currently, people with pensions worth more than £100,000 are more likely to engage regularly with their pension. Future planning should not only be the province of the wealthy. Once the dashboard is up and running—according to the MaPS, the pension dashboard programme is coming shortly, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle has assured us, with the system currently being tested—I hope that savers across society use it and take control of their savings.
I also hope that the dashboard will help to alleviate savings gaps. Currently, the value of women’s pensions are 60% of the value of men’s on retirement. Women have historically had to work harder throughout their working lives to earn the same amount. Although the situation is improving, women still face greater caring responsibilities, which often lead to their taking time out of the workforce or cutting back on their hours.
I hope that the introduction of pensions dashboards will encourage more people to engage in planning for their future, because even in the current financial climate it is important that people are educated about their options for the future. The Bill will give people confidence that their money is safe and ensure that they are given accurate information and can make informed decisions about how to save for their hard-earned pensions.
David Johnston (Wantage) (Con)
We do not think about our pensions enough, let alone talk about them enough. We should acknowledge the fact that a lot of people did not have them, which is why auto-enrolment has been such an important policy. Since this Government introduced auto-enrolment, nearly 11 million more people have been saving into a pension, although some people still do not have them. Auto-enrolment has been a welcome development.
Even people who do have a pension can find them difficult to understand. They see an amount on their pay slip that disappears from their pay, but they do not really have a sense of what that will mean for them in retirement. The total sum that they have saved may look large until it is divided across their life expectancy after they have retired; that might make it seem a much smaller sum. We know that contributions are not generally at the levels they should be.
We are very fortunate to have a Minister who is passionate about pensions, and about making sure that people have good pensions that are clearly understood. That is also why these dashboards will be so important, because it is a complex area that people do not understand, and having one place where someone can clearly see how much money they have saved will help them to plan for their retirement. To the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), people often collect several pensions through their working lives from different places that are not easily transferable. They can entirely lose the information about them; they have no sense of how much is in each of them, or how to bring them together and what that might mean. As such, the Bill is very welcome.
We have often seen scandals arise from the complexity of pensions, and we all know of very high-profile national scandals involving pensions. We know of some local cases—I have my own local case that I have been working on—where people have thought their money would be well guarded, but have found decades later that the promises that were made to them have been abandoned, and when they have tried to seek redress, they have felt blown off by authorities: “Too late, too bad. You’ve lost that money.” As such, while I would like to think that none of the people managing pensions would take money out of their assets in order to pay fines, I am afraid that based on all the things we have seen in the pension industry over the years, I do not have that confidence. I totally accept that it will be a small minority, but the safeguard in the Bill is a very important one to have in place, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle on bringing it in.
Richard Fuller (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)
As is often the case in these debates, one prepares a long speech, only to be told to hurry up and only speak for a couple of minutes—hon. Members may have heard that from me during our last Bill debate. I will take this opportunity to ask the Minister some questions that I hope will be helpful, and to make a broader general point to the House.
As other hon. Members have said, the underlying change regarding pensions dashboards regulations that this Bill, skilfully introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson), seeks to make is to improve a commonplace problem for many pensions, which is that we do not know where our pensions are. They are very hard to track, which leads to all sorts of unintended consequences: indeed, the Pensions Policy Institute has estimated that 1.6 million pensions with a total assessed value of £19.4 billion have been lost. I do not know whether that is a number that the Minister recognises, but my hon. Friend is absolutely right to bring the Bill forward as an additional measure of consumer or pensioner protection.
Could the Minister clarify the stage at which penalties will be levied? Is it on advisement that a pension provider has done wrong? Will it be after a warning, or after egregious ignorance of warnings by a provider? I think that clarity would be helpful. Will it be in the public domain that a penalty has been levied, similar to the national living wage regulations? It is an important question, because there is a significant imbalance in knowledge between fund operators and pension holders.
What assessment has taken place of levying fines on those with professional qualifications, and the ability of professional standards bodies to operate assessments? Clearly, integrity is a crucial characteristic when managing people’s pensions. When it comes to levying fines against an individual—I understand that fines can be levied against both an institution and an individual—have we investigated the implications carefully enough? Have the Government liaised with professional standards bodies to ensure that if someone is fined, it does not unduly limit their ability to continue to operate? Who will levy and assess the fine: the regulator or the courts? I believe the Minister will say that it will be the regulator, but perhaps she could confirm that.
That point brings me to a more general one about the House’s oversight of regulators. In this instance it is the Pensions Regulator, but we also have Ofgem, Ofwat and the FCA. We assume that providing powers to a regulator means that everything will work wonderfully well, but frequently it does not. There is a significant gap in the oversight of many of our regulators in the UK. It affects the operations of this Parliament, and it needs addressing urgently. For example, when the Financial Services and Markets Bill was going through this House, I sought amendments to ensure that the FCA met certain performance indicators as a requirement for providing services to participants, because without them our competitiveness is hurt.
Another example is Ofgem’s decisions about who can participate in the energy market or how on earth to handle the price cap through 2020-21. Those are serious questions and serious decisions, but where is the accountability? I am not sure that the current structure, in which we rely on Select Committees, is sufficient. Without getting into the general point, perhaps the Minister might find time to say whether she is happy about the ability of the Work and Pensions Committee to fulfil its duties with respect to oversight of the Pensions Regulator.
Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) on her work on the Bill. I thank hon. Members across the House who have contributed to our debates during its passage.
This is an important Bill. People who work hard and save all their lives should have every right to expect a decent pension in their retirement. The Bill will play an important role in helping to protect the interests of people who are saving for a pension, as we have heard. The Opposition agree with the principle that pension scheme trustees should be responsible if they fail to meet their legal requirements, rather than responsibility falling on people who are saving for a pension.
Without the provisions in the Bill, there is a real risk that fines could fall on scheme members. That problem was highlighted recently by the Pensions Regulator—I take note of the concerns that the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) raised about regulators—which warned that many trustees are at risk of failing to meet their legal pensions dashboard responsibilities. There is a very real risk that fines could be issued as a result. The regulator has made it clear that it will take a dim view of trustees who fail to prioritise their pensions dashboard responsibilities.
People saving for a pension should not be let down by the actions of fund managers and trustees. That is why the Opposition support this important Bill. Indeed, we would have liked the Government to take action earlier; we would have liked Ministers to include the Bill’s provisions in the original dashboard legislation. I wish the hon. Member for Cheadle every success with her Bill, but it would be very helpful if the Minister explained whether the omission of those measures from the original legislation was a mistake or whether there was an element of deliberate policy. I look forward to the Minister addressing that point.
Pensions policy is a long-term issue and a very important one. Legislation introduced in this Parliament and the last Parliament will have implications for many years to come. The dashboard is an important attempt to make information more easily accessible to pension scheme members. I welcome it—I think it will play an important role in explaining pensions, as we have heard from colleagues across the House, and in helping to encourage people to save more for their retirement—but the Government cannot rely on the dashboard alone to address all the issues in the UK pensions system. I believe that Ministers should be doing more both to encourage saving and to support pensioners at this difficult time. We must all do more in this country to ensure that people are saving enough for their retirement.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Laura Trott)
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) for promoting the Bill and I congratulate her on navigating it through to this stage. I have done a private Member’s Bill so I know that that is no mean feat. It requires a huge amount of work, which has been on display today, as have her skills in getting this through. I also thank the Opposition for their support for the Bill, and I thank all of those who have spoken today: my hon. Friends the Members for Clwyd South (Simon Baynes), for Watford (Dean Russell), for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), for Wantage (David Johnston) and for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller). I will endeavour to deal with as many of his questions as I can, but I will write to him on any I am unable to address. I also pay tribute to my predecessors in this role, my hon. Friends the Members for Hexham (Guy Opperman) and for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), who spoke in support of the Bill on Second Reading and in Committee respectively. I am proud to complete the trio.
Private pensions have undergone a quiet revolution in recent decades. It used to be the case that retirement income was guaranteed by the employer via a defined benefit pension. That started to change with the introduction of defined contribution schemes in the early 1990s. Those types of schemes put the risk of the eventual outcome entirely at the feet of the employees, with no guaranteed contribution from employers. That clearly has a huge potential impact on the adequacy of someone’s private pension for retirement, and introduced a huge new complex financial world for individuals to navigate. The intergenerational impact of this is stark. One group of people is able to retire on a guaranteed pension provided by their employer and have protections—provided by the financial assistance scheme and, latterly, the Pension Protection Fund— in respect of the employer going bust. The second group of people are given no guarantees on the value of their pension, if indeed they have one at all, and they are exposed to market conditions, are reliant on the performance of their individual fund, and wildly different levels of contribution are made by the employer—in some cases, none are made at all.
That is why the introduction of automatic enrolment in 2012 was so important. My hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle is right to say that automatic enrolment has been an incredible success and has achieved a transformational effect on retirement savings in the UK, both by employers and by employees. It has seen millions more people working to contribute to their workplace pension and has normalised workplace pension saving. Automatic enrolment is re-establishing a culture of retirement saving for a new generation, with more than 10.8 million workers enrolled into a workplace pension to date and an additional £33 billion more saved in real terms in 2021 than in 2012.
Matt Rodda
Will the Minister pay tribute to the work of the Pensions Commission and, indeed, the last Labour Government, who designed the policy? Obviously, it was implemented in 2012.
Laura Trott
The Pensions Commission did a great piece of work. As the shadow Minister rightly pointed out, it was implemented by the Conservatives.
Automatic enrolment was designed specifically to help groups who have historically been less likely to save, such as women and lower earners. My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon referred to women, and automatic enrolment has particularly helped them; millions more have been saving into a pension for the first time. Workplace pension participation among eligible women working in the private sector has risen from 40% in 2012 to a brilliant 87% in 2021—that is the same level as for eligible men in the private sector. We absolutely know that there is more to do, particularly to enable young adults, lower earners and part-time workers to achieve greater security in later life. The 2017 review of automatic enrolment sets out the Government’s ambition to enable people to save more and to start saving earlier by abolishing the lower earnings limit and reducing the qualifying age for automatic enrolment to 18. We are committed to implementing these measures in the mid-2020s.
However, the success of automatic enrolment in increasing the number of pension savings and the number of pension pots people have comes with policy problems that we have to solve. People have an average of 11 jobs in their lifetime. With automatic enrolment, they will often have a new pension pot every time they move job. Research in 2021 suggested that 73% of people have multiple pension pots, and research by Scottish Widows suggests that almost half of workplace pension holders do not know how many pension pots they hold with previous employers. Indeed, they will frequently forget about their pension pots from previous employers altogether.
The first policy issue with automatic enrolment that we therefore need to address is ensuring that pots are reunited with people. While estimates and definitions of lost pension pots vary, the latest survey from the Pensions Policy Institute suggests that the value of lost pots in the UK may have grown from £19.4 billion in 2018 to £26.6 billion in 2022.
The second issue that my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle alluded to is that many people have multiple pension pots, and it can be difficult for people to keep track of what they have saved for retirement. Having lots of pension pots can be confusing. The Financial Conduct Authority’s recent survey showed that 54% of defined contribution pension holders aged 45 to 64 say they have little or no idea of how much annual income they expect to have from their defined benefit contributions.
Members will be pleased to know that we have a solution to these issues: pensions dashboards. Dashboards will allow individuals to view information about their multiple pensions, including their state pension, in one place, online—even pots they had forgotten they had in the first place. As my hon. Friend the Member for Watford said, it will tell us what our future looks like.
Numerous Members asked about timings. The Pensions Dashboards Regulations 2022, which set out the requirements for relevant occupational pension schemes to be connected to the pensions dashboards digital system, were approved by the House in November 2022 with cross-party support, and they have now come into force. We hope to see the first schemes connecting to the dashboards infrastructure in the coming months.
Members also asked when individuals will be able to access these dashboards. We refer to this as the dashboards available point. As set out in the Pensions Dashboards Regulations 2022, the dashboards available point will be when the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is satisfied that the dashboards are ready to support widespread use by the general public. The Government consulted last year, and in response to the consultation we set out a broad framework of relevant matters that will be considered before the Secretary of State announces the dashboards available point. That will include consideration of the level of coverage; ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the service; and testing the user experience.
Matt Rodda
Could the Minister tell the House what plans the Department has to publicise the roll-out of the dashboards? Clearly many pension savers are already not aware of their full entitlement, and there is a risk that they may not be aware of the dashboard itself.
Laura Trott
The timetable set out in the regulations is about pension providers uploading the information to the dashboard. When that is available for individuals is a decision that the Secretary of State then has to take, but the timetable for information being uploaded is public and is the one agreed in the regulations. I hope that that answers the hon. Gentleman’s question.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle said, in order to ensure compliance with dashboards regulations, the Pensions Regulator has been given power to take enforcement action for non-compliance with any of the requirements in part 3 of the Pensions Dashboards Regulations 2022. That includes the possibility that the regulator may, at its discretion, issue penalty notices of up to £5,000 for individuals or up to £50,000 in other cases, such as corporate trustees. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire asked me lots of questions, and I will write to him, because I need to hurry up.
In conclusion, it is to the huge credit of my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle that she successfully brought the Bill forward on a cross-party basis and navigated its passage. I am delighted to restate that the Government support the Bill and will continue to support it as it moves through Parliament. I wish it every success.
Mary Robinson
With the leave of the House, Mr Deputy Speaker, I will take this opportunity to thank the Minister and Members on both sides of the House for their support throughout this process, and extend my appreciation and thanks to the Public Bill Office and officials from the Department for Work and Pensions for their guidance. It has also been brilliant to have cross-party support.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Simon Baynes), who has great experience of dashboards and really knew the subject; my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), who brought her experience on the Select Committee to the Chamber, and who spoke with wisdom and knowledge; and my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell), who spoke about the importance of transparency, which should be the key to so much that we do. My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon described dashboards as a “game changer”, and my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) spoke of the imbalance of knowledge between schemes and members. That imbalance is what we need to address now, for the sake of the 52 million people who will potentially benefit from the Bill.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.
Pensions Dashboard (Prohibition of Indemnification) Bill
Monday 23rd January 2023
(1 year, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Act 2023 Read Hansard Text
Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Bill
Friday 3rd March 2023
(1 year, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Act 2023 Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Young of Cookham
That the Bill be now read a second time.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, in moving that the Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Bill be read a second time, I reassure noble Lords that these dashboards are totally different from the ones in the REUL Bill which have generated such excitement this week.
After gathering significant cross-party support in the other place, where Mary Robinson successfully steered the Bill through the parliamentary process, I am hopeful that it will receive a similarly positive reaction here. This is a simple yet important measure designed to safeguard the interests of those saving for their pension.
By way of background, I have a long-standing interest in pensions legislation, having spoken in the 1970s when Barbara Castle introduced the state earnings-related pension scheme, and more recently speaking about the potential benefits of the pensions dashboard during the passage of the pensions Act 2021. I see in their places today several aficionados from that debate.
With record numbers of people saving for retirement, it is more important than ever that people understand their pensions information and prepare for financial security in later life. Pensions dashboards will be digital tools available free of charge to consumers, designed to bring together individuals’ different pensions, including the state pension, in one place online. This will fundamentally change the way that people interact with their pensions, thereby helping to support more informed retirement planning.
As my noble friend the Minister will confirm, the Government continue to work closely with industry and their key delivery partners, such as the Pensions Dashboards Programme—which is part of the Money and Pensions Service—the Pensions Regulator and the Financial Conduct Authority, to progress this dashboards project. I am grateful to my noble friend for arranging meetings for noble Lords with the FCA to update us on that progress, and I am grateful to his officials for their briefing for this debate.
While it is true that millions of people are saving for their retirement, it is also the case that consumers are not generally well engaged with their different pensions. This has been highlighted by the FCA, which estimates that 53% of adults contributing to a defined contribution pension have not reviewed how much their DC pension pots are worth in the last 12 months. In addition to this, the Pensions Policy Institute estimates that over 2.8 million pension pots were considered to be lost in 2022, representing an increase of 73% since 2018. Pensions dashboards can help to address this issue by bringing together people’s various pensions, including state pension, in one place online. This will reconnect savers with their lost or forgotten pension pots, and by doing so will help people plan for their well-deserved retirement.
There is a requirement in the Pension Schemes Act 2021 for the Money and Pensions Service to provide a pensions dashboard service. This was a welcome addition to that Act which I pressed for at the time, along with other noble Lords. Moreover, it will also be possible for others to enter the market and provide dashboards, which will be bound by requirements set out in the Pensions Dashboards Regulations and regulated by the FCA. That will provide scope for innovation, helping to engage a broad range of users and meet the varied needs of the millions of people with pensions savings. Importantly, individuals will see the same information regardless of which dashboard service they use, and robust rules will be in place to ensure consumers’ interests are at the forefront of all dashboards.
The Pensions Dashboards Regulations 2022, which were approved by this House in November last year and subsequently came into force in December, place requirements for occupational pension schemes to be connected to a digital ecosystem designed by the Money and Pensions Service. These requirements include, for example, the need for pension schemes and providers to continue to comply with the connection, security and technical standards published from time to time by the Money and Pensions Service. There are also requirements relating to the provision of pensions information at the request of a pension scheme member.
Under the Pensions Dashboards Regulations, the Pensions Regulator may, if necessary, take enforcement action against trustees or managers of occupational pension schemes in the event of non-compliance. For each breach of the regulations, this could result in penalties being imposed of up to £5,000 for individuals or up to £50,000 in other cases, such as for corporate trustees. These are significant penalties, but the House may be surprised to hear that there is nothing in the legislation which prohibits the trustees or managers being reimbursed for those penalties using the assets of the pension scheme. My noble friend the Minister can confirm, but I understand that this was simply an oversight during the passage of the Pension Schemes Act 2021, and the omission escaped the eagle eyes of noble Lords scrutinising the Bill.
My Bill addresses this critical issue by making it a criminal offence for trustees or managers of occupational pension schemes to reimburse themselves from the assets of the pension scheme for penalties imposed for compliance breaches under the Pensions Dashboards Regulations. If a trustee or manager was found guilty of this offence, the Bill’s provisions would allow for a maximum sentence of up to two years in prison, or a fine, or both. This is intended to provide an effective deterrent to such unscrupulous behaviour.
The Bill does not place any new costs or requirements on occupational pension schemes but rather works by extending existing legislation which provides for a similar prohibition in a number of other areas of pensions legislation, including automatic enrolment. I hope noble Lords agree that it increases protection for pension savers from any unscrupulous persons. I look forward to working with the Minister and other noble Lords as we aim to secure its swift passage through the House. I beg to move.
Baroness Altmann (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Young on his excellent introduction and sponsorship of this important but limited Bill. I also congratulate our honourable friend Mary Robinson on introducing it in the other place. I am delighted that the Government and my noble friends on the Front Bench are supporting this Bill.
As my noble friend Lord Young has explained, the pensions dashboard should be, and I hope will be, an important element of the pensions landscape for ordinary people who have pensions savings and perhaps wish to know more about what they have in their pension fund. Given the complexities of pensions, and even with contributions going into them, so many people do not really understand or know quite how much money is going in on their behalf or how much is accumulating for them. So there is a job of work to do on financial education.
What is so important is that, once people can see all their pension information, they can be assured that the system in place to oversee the dashboards protects them. This Bill is an added element of the armoury that is so important in ensuring that rogue operators of a pensions dashboard would not be able to cover up their mistakes or pay for their mistakes by taking money out of individuals’ pension funds. It is hard to see how someone would argue against the measures in the Bill, which simply will mean that, if the person providing the dashboard or responsible for the dashboard is fined by the regulator for doing something against the rules, they cannot just take money out of the ordinary customers’ pension funds but would have to pay it themselves. Although my noble friend considers the penalties significant, one might argue whether a £5,000 fine, or even a £50,000 fine for a corporate, is sufficient to deter wrongdoing. I think the level of penalties is applicable across pensions and will, I hope, be sufficient to ensure that we have a safe system.
I have given my noble friend notice of a few questions I have about the dashboard, which are very important in terms of the programme itself, especially after the announcement yesterday by our honourable friend Laura Trott, the Pensions Minister, that the dashboard programme is going to be reset—whatever that might mean; we will find out soon.
The first question, which relates to the clear need to delay the introduction of this long-awaited measure, is on the security of Verify, or its alternative system, which is designed to protect members’ data. I do not know if my noble friend could update the House on that. Some of the problems were due to what we have learned recently about the errors in state pension records, especially for women, where many women have found that the information is incorrect and, in some cases, has been for many years—they were already in retirement and still had not had the correct amount. How is the department getting on with its correction exercise?
The other concern might be around the records and readiness of public sector pension schemes to connect to the dashboards. With the McCloud remedy needing to be implemented, there are going to be significant administration issues. Could my noble friend give us any comfort on that or an indication of timescales? I hope he can assure us that at least the Nest Pensions fund is ready for connection. That is a very large one, set up by the Government to cater for low-paid workers and people with small amounts of pension.
Finally, I ask for clarity from my noble friend on an issue I have raised so many times in this House, and have tried to insert in the legislation as it has been going through. What is the status of the checks on the accuracy of all pensions data? I understand that the fines we are discussing may be imposed if people fail to connect to a dashboard or do not have a service that works properly on the dashboard, but are there also fines and penalties for people who load incorrect data? It is not just about loading the information. Is there any requirement in law—and who would it fall upon and what would be the penalties for failure—to ensure that the pension information for each person has been checked and verified and is as accurate as that process could produce?
Overall, I welcome the Bill and am pleased that the Government are supporting it. I wish it safe, quick passage through the House.
Lord Sharkey (LD)
My Lords, I can be very brief. We support this Bill and congratulate the honourable Mary Robinson MP on seeing the necessity for it, devising it and seeing its safe passage through the Commons. During that passage, the Bill attracted widespread and enthusiastic support from all sides, including from the Government themselves.
The Bill clearly fixes what could have been an extremely unfortunate loophole, and I confess to some chagrin that we did not spot the loophole at an earlier stage. I had thought that we had been pretty thorough—and lengthy—in our scrutiny. It is surely obvious that we should prevent trustees or fund managers who are fined for breach of the dashboard regulations reimbursing themselves from the funds of which they are trustees or managers. Equivalent prohibitions already exist for other aspects of pensions governance, and we clearly need to add the Bill’s prohibitions to that list.
We would also like to speed the progress of this Bill through this House, ideally unamended, to ensure that the loophole is closed quickly. We want to be able to prevent, for example, reimbursements for fines levied for failures to meet the required target dates for connection to the MaPS dashboard—although, as the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, just pointed out, that may not be quite so pressing as it was before yesterday.
Having said all that, there are just a few areas in which I would welcome a little more detail from the noble Lord, Lord Young, who has introduced this Bill with his customary clarity and fluency. I understand that for a breach of the dashboard regulations, such as a failure to connect to MaPS on time, TPR can issue a penalty notice of up to £5,000 where the trustee or manager is an individual, or up to £50,000 where the person is a body corporate. These do not seem to me to be very large amounts, especially given the resources available to large pension funds. How were these amounts decided on and why is it thought they will prove an adequate deterrent to noncompliance with the regulations?
I understand that, under the terms of the Bill in Clause 1, the penalty imposed for use of the pension funds to reimburse managers for fines imposed for breach of the regulations would be, on summary conviction, a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum and, if convicted on indictment, a maximum of a two-year prison sentence, a fine or both. What is the level of the statutory maximum fine, is there is a similar limit to the fine levied for conviction on indictment—because that does not does not appear to be clear in the Bill—and could the noble Lord say, for these penalties, as for the penalties for breach of the regulations themselves, how they were arrived at and how they were assessed as providing sufficient punishment for breaching, or disincentive to breach, the regulations? Finally, I ask the noble Lord for reassurance that the extent of the recovery of any funds illegally diverted as reimbursement for fines will be taken into account when deciding the appropriate penalty for that action.
I conclude by once again congratulating Mary Robinson and the noble Lord, Lord Young, on this Bill and wishing it a speedy passage.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this Second Reading debate and, in doing so, I declare my financial services interests as set out in the register. I congratulate Mary Robinson on securing this Private Member’s Bill: it is the model of what a Private Member’s Bill should do. My noble friend Lord Young said in his excellent introduction that it was specific and effective—and it is certainly that. Again, congratulations to Mary Robinson, my noble friend Lord Young and everybody who has helped in the preparation of the Bill to get it to this stage.
Pensions have somewhat lost their sheen since perhaps the 1970s, when my noble friend Lord Young spoke about them, yet, when you look at what is behind a pension, it still makes sense today. It is still a positive proposition to have something separate from the employer, protected by a trust structure, to set you up for your retirement. But, since the development of pensions, in relatively recent history, Equitable, Maxwell, Brown and other issues have taken the sheen off that pensions promise—but they should not. Perhaps there is a need for a great big branding exercise to be done.
Auto-enrolment has certainly played its part: perhaps we should all consider how best to rebrand what is fundamentally a very positive proposition for people to connect and commit to as early as possible in their working lives to ensure that security when they reach the age of retirement, be that 65, 66, 67, 68—or whenever that may come to all of us. To my noble friends the Minister and Lord Young, I say: should we not consider effective means to increase our efforts to promote the whole proposition of pensions as a positive means, which is potentially in need of rethinking but essentially a very good thing to have as part of our society and economy?
Moving to the issue at hand of dashboards, the simple and effective measure in the Bill is just that. Will my noble friend Lord Young or the Minister confirm that it simply brings into line the proposition which runs through all pensions legislation when it comes to the behaviour of trustees in such situations, so it is a clear and obvious reset of what the 2021 Act did not include? The great possibilities of pensions dashboards are in what we are able to do with data. If we have clear and coherent data and people are able to have it in real time on their devices, that can only be a positive thing, if the right levels of education, communication and understanding can also be put into that mix.
As my noble friend Lady Altmann asked: what is being done to ensure that that data is robust, reliable, consistent and the complete picture? It is true in this instance, but also across all that we may be able to do in fintech with the new technologies we have available to us, that it is only as good as the quality of the data that underpins it, and dashboards are the obvious, clear example in front of us today. That data point is critical to consider at every point to ensure that, when an individual looks at their dashboard, they can know that that is the real-time, accurate representation of what they hold across all their pension pots.
Finally, on the question of digital ID, again it is pertinent in this instance, as it is to everything we seek to do in a digital economy for the UK. None of this will work effectively unless we get to grips with digital ID. So is the Minister satisfied with the progress we are making on digital ID for the UK? Where are we currently and where will the responsibility for digital ID rest, with the changing departmental structure across Whitehall? Can he urge ministerial colleagues to further increase the pace in this digital ID work, because it is critical to so much of what we are trying to achieve? It must be secure, it must be reliable, it must cover all the issues around privacy, and we still have quite a journey to cover on that issue.
To conclude, again I offer congratulations to my noble friend Lord Young and Mary Robinson. This is a specific, clear and effective Private Member’s Bill. I wish it swift, safe speed into statute.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, for introducing this Bill, and all noble Lords who have contributed. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Young, for his characteristically clear introduction. I commend him on his many years of service in the interests of debating pensions and, like him, I say it is nice to have those of us interested in pensions dashboards back together again. It is always good to get the band back together again, even if the pensions dashboards crew is about as un-rock and roll as it is possible to be. But it is lovely to be here today.
I have a long speech on the importance of pensions, which I am going to spare your Lordships this morning because, if nothing else, the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, has done a fine job of this and it is a very narrow Bill today. But since the discussion has ranged a bit more widely, I will say that we were supportive of the idea of pensions dashboards in the original legislation but that support came with a number of questions. Like so many things, things can be a good idea, but how they are done is crucial to whether they end up being a good idea. We raised questions about ID, data security, governance and redress. What happens when things go wrong? This is an unusual situation, where tens of billions of pounds of assets will be mandated by the state to be released and put on to this central spot. If something goes wrong, this is potentially very serious indeed.
I think that was amplified by the Government’s insistence on going with commercial dashboards from the outset. This House had to press to insist that a public dashboard be there from day one, but I still think the Government’s attachment to commercial dashboards raises some risks. Imagine for moment that you are a commercial pensions company. You can sit somebody down, show them your dashboard and say, “Look at your pots all over here. Let’s gather them all into one tidy pot in this corner. Should I just move them into this space?” It does not take very much imagination to consider the possibilities for mis-selling even within what is legal. Those questions have been raised and have yet to be satisfactorily answered.
The principle of today’s Bill is very simple. It is that the interests of pension scheme members should be protected from the actions of rogue trustees and others who fail in their statutory duties. The Bill, as we have heard, will make it a criminal offence for a trustee or scheme manager who is given a penalty for failing in their duties to dip into scheme funds to pay the penalty. Inasmuch as it aligns the position in relation to penalties for failure to fulfil dashboard requirements with those for other comparable penalties, the Bill seems straightforward and we are very happy to support it.
But I would like to add a few brief questions to those put to the noble Lord, Lord Young, and the Minister may wish to reflect his view as well, given the Government’s wholehearted support of this Private Member’s Bill. First, can somebody confirm to the House that this Bill simply replicates for dashboard-related breaches the prohibition in the Pensions Act 2004 which prevents trustees or managers using member funds to pay regulatory penalties; in other words, that there is nothing novel hidden in here?
Secondly, why was the provision not included in the Pension Schemes Act 2021? Was it, as the noble Lords, Lord Young and Lord Sharkey, have suggested, simply an oversight? If so, I do not think the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, should beat himself up. I do not think it is his job to bury in the small print details of how things may align with the original legislation. I certainly feel no guilt at all. Frankly, I am prone to feeling guilt but, on this occasion, I feel absolutely fine.
Thirdly, will it be permissible for trustees to be covered by indemnity insurance paid for out of scheme funds? I think this can be done elsewhere.
On a related point, when we debated the Pensions Dashboards Regulations on 15 November 2022, the then Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, said
“we accept that the regulatory requirements on trustees have grown a great deal over the years”.—[Official Report, 15/11/22; col. 839.]
It is always the case that rogue trustees can simply ignore the rules, but has the DWP made any assessment of whether there is a point at which the demands and risks of trusteeship might deter individuals and lead to a growth in the use of corporate trustees, and whether that might lead to a reduction in the important diversity of trustee experience which may be necessary to protect members’ interests?
My final question was going to be to ask whether trustees are ready for the first connection deadline on 31 August 2023. However—as the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, rightly pointed out—yesterday, from a clear blue sky, dropped a Written Ministerial Statement which was just 418 words long. It calmly and simply said that additional time would be needed to deliver the technology and for the
“industry to help facilitate the successful connection of a wide range of different IT systems to the dashboards digital architecture.”
The Minister continued:
“Given these delays, I have initiated a reset of the Pensions Dashboards Programme in which DWP will play a full role. The new Chair of the Programme Board will develop a new plan for delivery.”
The Statement also said:
“DWP will legislate at the earliest opportunity to amend the timing of these obligations”.
We do not know, therefore, when the start date will be, but given that we are not promised another update before the Summer Recess, presumably it is not imminent. Can somebody, either the mover or perhaps the Minister, tell the House what on earth has gone wrong? Is it technical? Is it problems with schemes? Is it data?
When did the Government know? Did they know when this Bill was going through another place just recently? Did they know when we debated the regulations in November in some considerable detail? I am really interested to know to what extent the problems associated with creating commercial dashboards and connecting them to the dashboard architecture from day one have contributed to the need for a reset. What does it mean that
“DWP will play a full role”
in the new programme? Was it not playing a full role already? Has that changed?
When will the Government legislate to delay the programme? Are there plans to amend, for example, the many forthcoming pensions regulations we have before us? Also, I wonder, given that there is now no urgency at all, would government legislation not be a better way to deal even with the matters under debate today than a Private Member’s Bill which has the wholehearted support of the Government?
The Government were so confident of being able to meet their dashboards timetable—–on which we challenged them—that they hardwired the connection dates for schemes into the schedule. It says that the “staging deadline” for
“master trust schemes that provide money purchase benefits only”
for 20,000 or more relevant members is 31 August 2023, and so on. They were that confident. But since then, because that was published, pension schemes have spent time and money scrabbling to get ready for those hard deadlines. I suspect the irony will strike them that we in Parliament are debating a Bill designed to ensure that trustees pay penalties if they do not get their schemes connected to the dashboards in a timely and appropriate manner and the DWP just slips out a Written Statement saying, “You know what, we are not going to make it for August, after all. We are just going to reset the programme and we will give you some kind of update before the summer.”
I know that things go wrong. I get this. I have been a special adviser in government. I have been involved in enough programmes. But when things go wrong, I think the House is owed an explanation of exactly what went wrong. I suggest to the Minister that one thing he might usefully do is to forward to his colleagues in another place the proceedings of this House on the original legislation, the debates on the regulations and the associated debates. The Government were warned that this was incredibly complex. They were warned about the issues about data, ID and all kinds of things. I think this may be a good opportunity, since we are to have a pause enforced, for the Minister to tell the House that he will take the opportunity both to engage with the concerns raised around the House and to brief the House on how these are going to be addressed. I look forward to the replies.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Viscount Younger of Leckie) (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Young on his excellent introduction to the Bill. My noble friend has made it clear to the House that the Bill will increase protection for pension savers. It has the full backing of His Majesty’s Government, and it gives me great pleasure to speak in support of it today.
The introduction of automatic enrolment has been a resounding success in helping people save for retirement, on a scale which was hard to imagine just 10 years ago. It has normalised workplace pension saving, with more than 10.8 million workers being enrolled into a workplace pension to date, and £33 billion more saved in real terms in 2021 than in 2012.
This success has, at the same time, resulted in challenges for the Government, consumers and the pensions industry more broadly. Research by Aegon found that 73% of people have multiple retirement or pension plans. While it is usual for people to move around the labour market throughout their working lives, this can make it difficult for people to keep track of what they have saved. Indeed, research by Scottish Widows in October 2022 has shown that nearly half of workplace pension holders do not know how many pension pots they hold with previous employers.
Pensions dashboards will help to address these issues—and I will come back to the point raised on dashboards. They will put the saver in control and allow them to view information about their pensions, including the state pension, in one place online. By doing so, dashboards will enable savers to be reunited with pension pots they may have lost or forgotten about over many years. To highlight how significant the total value of lost pots may be, the Pensions Policy Institute suggested in its paper last year that it could be as high as £26.6 billion.
The Pensions Dashboards Programme is supervised by the Money and Pensions Service to deliver the technology underpinning dashboards. This is far from a straightforward task. It involves connecting thousands of pension schemes so that millions of consumers are able to search for their pensions.
Yesterday, as has been mentioned in the House this morning, the Government published a Written Ministerial Statement which explained that additional time is needed to deliver the complex and technical solutions to enable the connection of pension providers and schemes, in accordance with the connection deadlines set out in the Pensions Dashboards Regulations 2022 and the Financial Conduct Authority’s corresponding rules for pension providers. Given these delays, my honourable friend in the other place, the Minister for Pensions, has initiated a reset of the Pensions Dashboards Programme, in which the DWP will play a full role. This will include a new chair of the programme board and the development of a new plan for delivery.
The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, spoke about the importance of ensuring 100% quality and security for these dashboards. I cannot give her more detail on precisely what the reset will mean, which was the gist of her question, but the DWP will play more of a part in terms of those who are managing the dashboard, including MaPS—she will know more about that. But I will endeavour to update her and the House as soon as I can on progress. Obviously, the WMS has just come out, but she rightly asked these questions and that is as much as I can tell her.
The Government will also amend the Pensions Dashboards Regulations 2022 at the earliest opportunity to provide the pensions industry with clarity about the timings of its legal obligations. The Government will ensure that the pensions industry has adequate time and the necessary technical information to prepare for any revised connection deadlines. The Minister for Pensions will provide a further update to Parliament before the Summer Recess, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, mentioned.
However, none of this detracts from the importance of this Bill, which is needed irrespective of the timeline for delivery. The Pensions Dashboards Regulations 2022 set out detailed requirements for occupational pension schemes to be connected to a digital ecosystem, which will enable the provision of pensions information at the request of a pension scheme member. As set out in the Written Ministerial Statement, this framework for dashboards set out in the regulations remains fit for purpose. The Pensions Regulator may take enforcement action for non-compliance with any of the requirements in part 3 of the Pensions Dashboards Regulations. Once connected to the dashboards ecosystem, occupational pension schemes may be in breach of the regulations—for instance, if they fail to maintain connection to the digital architecture or fail to provide information within the timeframe set out in the regulations. In the event of non-compliance, the Pensions Regulator may issue penalty notices of up to £5,000 for individuals or up to £50,000 in other cases, such as those involving corporate trustees. Several questions were raised in this respect, notably by my noble friend Lady Altmann and the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey.
Having covered the basic penalties, I add that the Pensions Regulator is required by the Regulators’ Code to take a proportionate, consistent and targeted approach to enforcement. However, in the event of multiple compliance breaches, the regulations allow TPR to issue multiple penalty notices within the same document. The Pensions Regulator’s consultation on its compliance and enforcement policy closed on 24 February 2023. In that consultation, TPR set out its intention to consider the total amount of any penalties issued in the light of the circumstances of the breaches and the impact they have had. TPR expects to publish its consultation response and final compliance by the summer. Hopefully, this helps to answer the questions raised by the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey. We feel that the levels are consistent with other areas of pensions legislation. He may know more about that than me, but that is what we believe. Regarding the question raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, there is nothing novel in the approach we are taking in this respect.
My noble friends Lord Holmes and Lady Altmann raised the important issue of data accuracy checks. It is critical that savers be able to trust the information in front of them. Trustees and managers have existing legal obligations in respect of data quality, including the accuracy principle under UK GDPR, which requires organisations to ensure that data remains accurate and up to date. The Pensions Regulator has set out its expectations on data quality in its record-keeping guidance. This includes that data be measured at least once a year. The regulator’s guidance on dashboards is also clear that trustees and managers must ensure that the values provided are accurate, and it urges them to work with administrators to improve data if required.
Bringing us back to base, this Bill from my noble friend Lord Young focuses on solving one key issue: that current pensions legislation does not prevent a trustee or manager being reimbursed for these penalties using funds from the pension scheme. The Bill increases protection for pension savers by prohibiting trustees and managers of occupational personal pension schemes from being reimbursed out of scheme asset in respect of penalties imposed on them for non-compliance with the Pensions Dashboards Regulations. The Bill would achieve this by amending Section 256 of the Pensions Act 2004, which already provides similar prohibition in other areas of pensions legislation. I confirm to my noble friend Lord Young—the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, mentioned this as well—that that was indeed an oversight. It did indeed escape the eagle-eyed lawyers—including that of the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, so I am sure that he can be forgiven.
Under the Bill’s proposals, if a trustee or manager were to be reimbursed, and knew or had reasonable grounds to believe that they had been so reimbursed, they would be guilty of a criminal offence unless they had taken all reasonable steps to ensure that they were not so reimbursed. Should a trustee or manager be found guilty, the provisions of the Bill allow a maximum sentence of up to two years in prison, or a fine, or both. Additionally, were any amount to be paid out of the assets of a scheme in such a way, the Pensions Regulator would have the power to issue civil penalties to any trustee or manager which fails to take all reasonable steps to secure compliance.
The Bill has been drafted to make provision across the United Kingdom. As noble Lords will know, pensions policy is transferred to the Northern Ireland Assembly and the usual process would be for the Assembly to provide a legislative consent Motion for any provision relating to a transferred area. However, the Government’s position is that if the Northern Ireland Assembly is unable to consider the matter before the final amending stage of the Bill, it should proceed unamended. Ultimately, the Government are of the view that it would be wrong for these protections not to extend to pension members in Northern Ireland.
A number of questions were raised in relation to and beyond this Bill. My noble friend Lady Altmann asked about NEST and its readiness for connection. The announcement yesterday allows the programme to develop a firmer footing and put it on a path to successful delivery, including ensuring that all data providers can connect safely and securely. The programme and DWP have been in regular contact with NEST and will continue to be over the coming months, to support it in preparing to meet its connection duties when the revised timeline is in place.
My noble friend Lady Altmann also asked about One Login, the successor to Verify. As she may know, there are currently more than 340 services on GOV.UK, with around 190 accounts accessed via 44 different sign-in methods. GOV.UK One Login will replace these with a single ubiquitous way for users to sign in and prove their identity. It will improve inclusion and save millions of pounds through collaboration, efficient service delivery and tackling fraud across departmental boundaries. Development of GOV.UK One Login is progressing at pace, and I can reassure my noble friend Lord Holmes that the core of the system has been launched—its sign-in element, a web-based identity verification journey and a fast-track identity-checking app. There are currently five live services using One Login, with more services expected to onboard in 2023-24. The Cabinet Office and the Government Digital Service are working closely with central government departments to ensure that the programme meets their and their users’ needs.
My noble friend Lady Altmann asked about security and the alternative to Verify. The Pensions Dashboards Programme has procured an interim identity service provider, whose contract runs until January 2024. The service it provides is aligned with the Government Digital Service’s good practice guide. The Money and Pensions Service is engaging with officials in the Cabinet Office and the Government Digital Service, as well as the wider market, building on the engagement work undertaken in 2020, to identify all possible options that may comprise its new identity service delivery model.
Returning to the Bill, the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, raised an important point about trustees using schemes to buy indemnity insurance. I can reassure her that the Bill would make it a specific criminal offence for pension scheme trustees or managers to reimburse themselves using the assets of the pension scheme in respect of penalties. It also includes taking out an indemnity policy but having the cost of that reimbursed through the scheme.
The noble Baroness also asked about—I am paraphrasing what she said—a chilling effect, particularly for non-professional trustees; it is a very good point. The Government acknowledge that many trustees do an excellent job, often on a voluntary basis. The vast majority of trustees are in schemes with fewer than 99 members and so would be outside the scope of these regulations unless they connected to pensions dashboards voluntarily. While we accept that the regulatory requirements on trustees have grown a great deal over the years, this is only right given what is at stake, since we are talking about the pensions savings of millions of people. The Pensions Regulator will provide an extensive programme of communications to support trustees to meet the requirements in the pensions dashboards regulations.
The noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, asked about the statutory maximum fine in relation to summary conviction. I may have covered that, but I will write to him if I have not answered the question; I hope that is helpful.
To conclude, I am firm in my view that everyone rightfully deserves protection for their pension savings; we all know that, and that is exactly what the Bill does. It is a simple Bill in that it will extend a prohibition in existing legislation rather than placing new requirements or additional costs on to occupational pension schemes. However, the proposals under the Bill are powerful enough to swiftly deter any rogue actors from reimbursing themselves using pension assets that belong to hard-working people. I hope that the House recognises that and supports its passage today.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate and for their support for this modest legislation. As my noble friend Lady Altmann said, the Bill is impossible to oppose, and I hope that optimistic forecast is carried out. She raised issues about penalties. My noble friend the Minister answered that, but so far as this Bill is concerned it seems to me that two years in prison is quite a severe deterrent for anyone who seeks to break the rule set out in the Bill.
The noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, fired at me four technical questions about penalties, and I am grateful to him. Fortunately, the bullets were intercepted by my noble friend the Minister, who answered them. As we have heard, if by any chance the replies do not come up to standard, my noble friend has promised to write to the noble Lord.
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Holmes, who reminded us about the success of auto-enrolment. I agree with what he said about the need to promote early investment in pensions to get the benefit of the magic of compound interest. He also touched on a subject close to my heart; namely, digital identification and the history of the Verify programme. My noble friend the Minister dealt with that, but as I understand it, rather than wait for the Government to come up with their solution, the programme dashboard is developing an interim programme which will be compatible with the one the Government end up with.
Those who came along to listen to the longer speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, on pensions will have been disappointed, as she decided not to deliver it. We look forward to hearing that on a separate occasion. She referred to the Written Ministerial Statement announcing a delay in the programme. I want to congratulate the Whitehall wordsmith who came up with the expression “initiated a reset”. I think the train operating companies will want to follow that example, and I look forward to hearing on Monday that Great Western Railway has “initiated a reset” to the 8.14 from Cookham to Paddington.
Finally, I am very grateful to my noble friend the Minister, who answered, I hope, all the questions that were theoretically directed at me. He reminded us of the large sum of money—£26 billion—represented by “lost” pensions and reminded us about the complexity of the plumbing involved in getting the dashboard going. I am also very grateful to him for his comprehensive reply to the debate and for the Government’s support.
Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Bill
Tuesday 28th March 2023
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, I understand that no amendments have been set down to this Bill and that no noble Lord has indicated a wish to move a manuscript amendment or to speak in Committee. Unless, therefore, any noble Lord objects, I beg to move that the order of commitment be discharged.
Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Bill
Friday 21st April 2023
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Viscount Younger of Leckie) (Con)
My Lords, before we commence proceedings on the Bill, I am obliged to make a statement on legislative consent in relation to it.
The Bill has been drafted so as to make provision across the United Kingdom. As noble Lords will know, pensions policy is transferred to the Northern Ireland Assembly and the usual process would be for the Assembly to provide a legislative consent Motion for any provision relating to a transferred area. However, due to the continued absence of the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive, a legislative consent Motion cannot be secured.
Historically, the Northern Ireland legislation in this area has mirrored that in Great Britain and, following engagement with the Northern Ireland Department for Communities, the Government’s position is that it is important that this legislation proceeds to apply in Northern Ireland in the absence of a legislative consent Motion. This will ensure the people of Northern Ireland can benefit from the Bill’s important protections.
Motion
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, I am pleased that the Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Bill has now reached its final stage in your Lordships’ House. I thank my noble friend the Minister and his officials for their support, as well as those noble Lords who supported the Bill on Second Reading: my noble friends Lady Altmann and Lord Holmes, who flank me on either side, the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, all of whom who are present in the Chamber this morning to ensure the safe passage of this legislation. I am also grateful to Mary Robinson for introducing the Bill and expertly steering it through all stages in the other place.
The Bill’s purpose is clear. It will increase protection for pensions savers by making it a criminal offence for trustees and managers of occupational pension schemes to reimburse themselves using assets of the pension scheme for penalties imposed on them due to non-compliance with any relevant pensions dashboard regulations. I hope noble Lords recognise the importance of the Bill and agree to its passage today. I beg to move.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, on piloting the Bill through the House with his usual flair, and it is very nice that we can all be here to see it on its way. It is a narrowly focused Bill which simply addresses a lacuna in the original legislation, and we are happy to support it. I also thank the noble Viscount for giving us an assurance at Second Reading that before long, we can look forward to an update on the likely implementation of the pensions dashboards themselves. It remains of paramount importance that people can save for their retirement with confidence and with an understanding of all the implications of the choices they are making or that have been made on their behalf. We support the creation of a pensions dashboard to contribute to that goal, although we will continue to debate with Ministers choices about how it can best be done. For today, we are pleased to wish this Bill on its way.
Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
My Lords, I, too, am grateful to my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham for presenting his Bill to the House, and to my honourable friend in the other place, Mary Robinson, for her skilled stewardship of the Bill. It is a pleasure again to offer my support for the Bill on behalf of the Government. I, like my noble friend, also thank all noble Lords who were present for Second Reading for their interest in the Bill and for supporting it as it moved towards its final stage.
I committed to follow up on the topics relating to this Bill and questions about pensions dashboards more broadly that were raised by noble Lords during the previous debate. I have placed copies of letters I sent after Second Reading in the House Library, and they are also available on the Bill’s webpage—hopefully, noble Lords have had a look at them. I hope the letters sent have helped to address these queries, which included asking for an update on progress on the department’s state pension records correction exercise, the readiness of public service pension schemes to connect to dashboards, and whether penalties could be incurred for loading incorrect data to pensions dashboards. Queries were also raised more specifically about the penalties which could be imposed on trustees and managers of occupational pension schemes under the proposals in the Bill, and for compliance breaches under the pensions dashboards regulations.
I further addressed questions about the challenges faced by the pensions dashboards programme in delivering the digital architecture underpinning pensions dashboards. On this final point, I made clear to the House during Second Reading the importance of this Bill, and that it is needed irrespective of the delivery timeline for pensions dashboards. To be helpful to the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, I also pledged—and I stick to that pledge—to update noble Lords as soon as is reasonably possible, and an invitation will be forthcoming.
To reiterate why the Bill is required, it corrects a legislative gap which, left as it is, means that no provision would prohibit trustees or managers from reimbursing themselves using pension scheme assets to pay penalties in respect of breaches of any relevant pensions dashboards regulations. There was unanimous agreement among noble Lords at Second Reading that this would be unacceptable.
The proposals under this Bill seek to deter rogue actors from reimbursing themselves using the assets of pensions scheme members by allowing criminal proceedings to be brought against trustees or managers of occupational pension schemes if they are reimbursed and knew or had reasonable grounds to believe that they had been reimbursed as such. If a trustee or manager is found guilty of this offence, the Bill’s provisions allow for a maximum sentence of up to two years in prison, or a fine, or indeed both.
As I emphasised at Second Reading, the Bill does not place any new requirements on trustees or managers of occupational pension schemes or burden them with additional costs. It simply extends an existing prohibition in Section 256 of the Pensions Act 2004, which already applies to a number of areas of pensions legislation, to include pensions dashboards.
To conclude, the Bill rightly increases protection for consumers saving for their retirement. I do hope, therefore, that the whole House will join me in its support for my noble friend’s Bill and agree to its passage.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to both Front-Benchers for their support and to my noble friend the Minister for addressing in correspondence some of the broader issues that were raised in a recent meeting on the pensions dashboard.
Royal Assent
Tuesday 2nd May 2023
(1 year, 7 months ago)
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