AEA Technology Pension Scheme

Wednesday 18th March 2015 Westminster Hall

11:00

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I am grateful to you, Mr Robertson, and to Mr Speaker for giving me the opportunity to raise the matter of the AEA Technology pension scheme, following the company’s pre-pack administration in 2012. I am also grateful to the Minister, my parliamentary neighbour, for being here to respond to the debate, and to my right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst) and my hon. Friends the Members for Newbury (Richard Benyon), for Reading West (Alok Sharma) and for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) for being here to support me. I give special thanks to the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy, my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey), and to his staff. He is the constituency Member concerned with the matter, and he and his staff have been very active on it, as have lots of other right hon. and hon. Members.

I have received continuing representations from my constituent Dr Ken Nicholson, who has been affected by the issue. I know that constituents of other Members have also been affected. I will start with some background information for context. The AEA Technology pension scheme is a defined-benefit final salary scheme, set up when AEA Technology, which was previously the commercial arm of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, was floated on the stock exchange in September 1996. AEA Technology had become a Government-owned company that April, although staff remained members of the UKAEA pension scheme until flotation.

The Atomic Energy Authority Act 1995 detailed the conditions for the privatisation of AEA Technology and included specific information regarding the pension arrangements for transferring staff. A schedule to the Act stated that benefits from the daughter scheme should be “no less favourable” than those that would have arisen from the UKAEA scheme as it was at the time. There was a duty to ensure the arrangements for the new scheme satisfied the demands specified in the Act, something the then Energy Minister, Tim Eggar, stressed on Second Reading of the Bill in March 1995.

[Alok Sharma (Reading West) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has come quickly to the nub of the matter. People made the transfer because they believed that the terms would be no less favourable than those they were enjoying before they did so. Does he agree that the key question is, who will compensate those who have lost out? I know that it happened many years ago under a previous Minister, but perhaps the Minister will address that point as well when he makes his remarks.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

My hon. Friend has made his point cogently. I will return to the matter of compensation later in my speech.

Once part of the new scheme, members were encouraged to transfer all accrued pension service from the UKAEA scheme, by a leaflet presented as impartial advice from the Government Actuary’s Department; it has recently been found that the leaflet was changed several times at the request of the UKAEA to remove references to risks involved in the transfer. Scheme members were assured that their pension would be safe. As both schemes were based on final salary, the decision by scheme members on whether to transfer service to the new scheme or to freeze it in the UKAEA scheme was based on a judgment of what would happen to their own salary in future years. They could not make the decision based on whether the new scheme contained more risk, since they had not been warned of any.

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

The AEA Technology staff are nuclear physicists accustomed to identifying risk and weighing cost-benefit. If they could not identify risk within the GAD advice, who could have?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

My hon. Friend makes a really potent point, which I will come on to later in my speech.

People had not been warned of the risks by the official leaflets that they received. The AEA Technology pension scheme received an initial injection of cash from its mother scheme, the UKAEA scheme, based on the accrued service and pension entitlements of the transferred members. The mother scheme was operating with a notional surplus at the time, but none of that surplus was passed to the new scheme, giving the Treasury an increased windfall. Since the AEA Technology pension scheme ran into deficit because of changes in actuarial valuations, it has now become apparent that insufficient funds were transferred into it when it was set up. Moreover, no written agreements appear to have been made to cover such an eventuality. In other words, either the Government have a continuing moral, and possibly legal, duty to those transferred members or they cannot have fully discharged their responsibility under the Atomic Energy Authority Act.

The Department for Work and Pensions has suggested the requirements of the Act may have been fulfilled because when it was launched the benefits from the new scheme matched those of the mother scheme. However, none of the transferring scheme members—my hon. Friend has made the very good point that they were extremely bright and able people—were eligible to draw benefits at the time, because none of them were retired, so the DWP’s claim cannot be true. The Act’s intention must have been that the new pension scheme would not change in future years if the UKAEA one did not, meaning the benefits were secure.

It is now proposed that the AEA Technology pension scheme be transferred to the Pension Protection Fund, where index-linking of benefits would be removed and replaced by an inflationary allowance, capped at a maximum of 2.5% for service from April 1997 onwards. That covers almost all post-privatisation service. It would further mean that all index-linking would be removed from service prior to that date—that is, from all service transferred from the Government sector, which the scheme members were told was secure. In addition, all members below retirement age would suffer a further 10% drop in their pension. The overall effect is a greatly diminished pension that is far less than the benefits that would have been due from the UKAEA scheme. It would not be equivalent, as was specified in the Atomic Energy Authority Act.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a good point. The key point to which we want the Minister to respond is that, as a public sector pension, the AEA Technology scheme had full protection linked to the retail price index. That has now been lost, on the basis of wrong advice that was given at the time.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

As I will explain in a minute, it was partly wrong advice at the time and partly the fact that the subsequent company went into a pre-pack.

As I was saying, the proposed transfer to the PPF means that the scheme would not be equivalent to the UKAEA scheme, as was specified in the 1995 Act. I would be grateful to hear the Minister’s views on whether the AEA Technology pension scheme should present a special case because it was formed as a result of privatisation, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury said. Additionally, does the Minister believe that the Government should have a duty of care to those staff who were transferred into the AEA Technology scheme? Do the Government have a moral and legal duty to act to protect the pension scheme members against loss, given the assurances that, as my hon. Friend said, were made to staff as part of the privatisation process both in Parliament and in the printed materials provided to scheme members by an arm of the Government at the time?

I understand that in 2010 AEA Technology made an unsuccessful acquisition of the US firm Eastern Research Group by issuing a large number of shares. Problems arose with ERG the following year because of late payments and delays in the US Government’s awarding of contracts. AEA Technology issued a statement in November 2011, which played down the prospects of the UK-based part of the company and highlighted ERG’s problems. That drove the company share price down to virtually zero. Notwithstanding that, the long-term prospects for ERG appeared good, as it had recently won a £100 million contract, and AEA Technology’s successful UK-based business, which had originated from the privatisation exercise, was profitable and actively recruiting at the time.

Given its financial situation and low share price, AEA Technology ran into cash-flow problems. Therefore, in November 2011, it began negotiating with various parties, including its bank, the scheme trustees, the PPF and the Pensions Regulator. The aim of the negotiations was to improve its financial position, and the plan that was agreed involved arranging a pre-pack administration to allow it to default on its pensions obligations and to start afresh under new, improved trading conditions—AEA’s original pensioners were about to suffer a serious double whammy.

The company’s share price was driven down so low—to about 0.05p, following a peak of almost £10 soon after flotation—that the company’s market capitalisation was less than £l million, which was less than the annual profit from the UK-based business alone. Given the low share price, investors would face no great financial loss from entering administration. The idea was for the PPF to take over the pension scheme and its assets. However, the PPF has fixed rates of compensation and, in particular, limitations on its rates for inflationary allowances. The net effect on scheme members, therefore, would be to reduce their pension pots to less than half of what they might originally have expected. That drop is greater than that explained by the scheme deficit. To add insult to injury, the scheme is contracted out, which means that its members will not be eligible for an additional state pension.

The pension scheme trustees initiated the pre-pack administration of AEA Technology by electing to wind up the pension scheme and to invoice AEA Technology for the full buy-out costs. Such action would be enough to make almost any company insolvent. The argument for entering a pre-pack administration was that it would maximise—that is pretty unrealistic—the company’s value, which would, in turn, maximise the scheme’s value for its members. Of course, that later turned out to be totally false. The money put into the scheme from the sale of the company was negligible by comparison with the losses caused by winding the scheme up. Scheme members could never have benefited from that; the beneficiaries could only ever have been the bank and the PPF.

AEA Technology was profitable and expanding, and it had a healthy order book, when it elected to enter pre-pack administration. The surviving parts of the company have continued to prosper. An air of secrecy shrouds the pre-pack negotiations, with everyone stating they are someone else’s responsibility or that information is commercially sensitive. Who it is who is commercially vulnerable is a big secret. That has also been the disingenuous response of the relevant Departments, while the various ombudsmen have thus far refused to get involved. What is the purpose of an ombudsman if, the moment they encounter a really difficult case, they fold and refuse to investigate?

Pre-pack administrations were set up with the intention of being for the benefit of creditors. The PPF was set up as a safety net for company pension schemes that run into trouble. The Pensions Regulator has a duty to protect pension scheme members’ best interests, as have the trustees. Yet in the case of AEA Technology, it appears that all those parties got together to help the company financially, at the expense, yet again, of those they were supposed to protect—the pension scheme members.

The AEA Technology case is special because the company was formed through privatisation. Many of its pension scheme members are ex-Government employees, who are extremely well qualified and extremely intelligent, and the Government have a continuing duty of care towards them. For that reason alone, the pre-pack administration needs careful investigation.

The case has highlighted other important issues. For example, there is the question whether pre-pack administrations are being abused. Additionally, the implications of defaulting on pensions for commercial reasons need to be understood and controlled if the Government are to be successful in promoting saving for retirement and in introducing a unified, simplified pension system into which transfers are the norm.

Sadly, in this case, it is all too clear that a large number of very bright people were misled by the information issued by a Department. Some of the information—the drafting was heavily influenced to minimise any reference to risk—may also amount to a misleading prospectus, and it needs to be thoroughly examined by the Government regulator.

I end by saying that the pre-pack administration of the AEA Technology pension fund and the information on which members transferred their entitlements need proper and thorough investigation, and scheme members need compensating accordingly. I look forward very much to what my right hon. Friend the Minister has to say, and I thank him for listening.

11:09

[The Minister for Pensions (Steve Webb)]

I congratulate my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), on securing this important debate. As he knows, I have taken an interest in the issue, and I met his constituent Dr Nicholson with him in 2013. I have also had a number of meetings with hon. Members and scheme members.

It is important to say, for what it is worth, that I hugely sympathise with anybody who built up pension rights, was expecting a certain pension and then did not get it. Nothing I say subsequently about the Government’s position takes away from the fact that we are dealing with a very unsatisfactory situation that all of us would want to avoid.

Let me go through the points my hon. Friend raised and respond to them as best as I can. The first is the issue of what the legislation meant when it said that the value of accruals in the new scheme had to be “no less favourable”. The scheme people came out of was essentially a civil service-type scheme. That meant the new scheme had to enable people to go on building up benefits that were no less favourable; it did not mean that what was then a private company had its pension deficit, for example, underwritten by the taxpayer indefinitely—it could not have meant that.

Let us suppose that the trustees of a hypothetical privatised new scheme invested recklessly and generated a huge deficit, resulting in insolvency. Would the taxpayer be responsible for the trustees’ actions? Similarly, if investment returns went badly for that private company or other private companies, would the taxpayer be indefinitely on the hook for any deficit? Clearly, that is not what the law meant, and it is not our understanding of what it meant; indeed, the more one thinks about it, the more one sees that it could not have been what the law meant. The law was quite clear that people transferring across had to build up benefits on the same—no less favourable—basis as under the scheme they had left. That was the scheme that was set up, which complied with the legislation.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I understand, and I agree with my right hon. Friend’s point. My point was that, at the time of transfer, the scheme was in surplus. Subsequently, the actuarial valuation proved that insufficient money had been transferred from the mother scheme to the daughter scheme. If insufficient money was transferred, the new scheme was never going to perform to the level the pensioners expected.

[Steve Webb]

Let me address that point. The first thing to say is that the trustees of the scheme the money went into agreed the transfer values. They could have said, “You’re not putting in enough money to reflect the benefits we are going to have to pay out,” but they signed off the transfer values at the time.

The notion of a surplus is strange, because this is an unfunded pension scheme until the point of transfer. It is just a liability on the Government’s books for decades to come. A flow of contributions has come in, and those are given a notional investment return in the Government books. The concept of a surplus is not what this means in plain language; it is not like the Government were sitting on a pot of money that they hid. Government accounting for public service unfunded pension schemes is very different from that for funded pension schemes, where a surplus has a real meaning. It sounds as though what we are talking about means something when it does not. This is about the way the Government accounts for public service unfunded schemes; it is not that money was held back.

A valuation was done on quite a prudent basis. If the money transferred across had been invested in quite a low-risk way, it would, at the point of transfer—that is the crucial point—have been enough to pay the liabilities that were transferred across. However, the world changed subsequently for this scheme and every other scheme: people started living longer, investment returns over time started falling and, as my hon. Friend said, accounting practices changed. All sorts of things changed, which meant that all sorts of private sector company pension schemes began to face bigger deficits. The AEA Technology pension scheme was not different or unique in that respect. The trustees accepted the transfer value, which was fair for the liabilities that were transferred across, even on a quite prudent basis.

[Alok Sharma]

Will the Minister give way?

[Steve Webb]

I wonder if I may make more progress, to be fair to my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds, as I want to respond on a few points.

The money went across; the firm was then private. Clearly, the business went on trading for 15 years or so. An issue arises about whether it was a prosperous, expanding firm where something funny went on, or on the brink of insolvency. I want to clarify what went on; my hon. Friend referred to it in part. In November 2011, the company issued a trading statement saying its financial position was deteriorating, and it was discussing the situation with its banks. In April 2012, AEA Technology’s latest forecast indicated that the company would be insolvent on a cash-flow basis by June 2012.

It can be simultaneously true that a company is recruiting more people and that it has terrible cash-flow problems. If the point is reached where it cannot meet its liabilities, it becomes insolvent. To give a sense of scale, the deficit in the pension fund as of 2011, on a standard basis, was £315 million, and the company could not afford to pay £6 million towards it. That is how bad things had got. So on the notion that somehow that £315 million deficit, which was £450 million on a buy-out basis, was going to be cleared, that was not going to happen.

Pre-pack administration is controversial and difficult and happens only when the options are insolvency with jobs lost and the pension fund going to the PPF, or insolvency with jobs saved and the pension fund going to the PPF. That was the choice. In fact, because of the pre-pack, hundreds of jobs were saved. To make a comparison with a straight insolvency, I am advised that the scheme would have got about £1 million with a routine insolvency, but the pre-pack enabled it to get between £6 million and £8 million.

My hon. Friend is quite right: frankly, when a scheme is £300 million in deficit that will not make any difference, because it is going to end up in the PPF anyway, so the benefit is to the PPF and not the members. However, the Government do not encourage struggling firms to shovel their pension fund deficits off to the PPF and carry on trading. It is allowed only where insolvency is inevitable. Our judgment was that that was the state of the company at the time, and the goal was to save some jobs, because the scheme was going to end up in the PPF anyway.

My hon. Friend asked about PPF benefits, and he is right: it is a compensation scheme. It is not a pension scheme that replaces and mirrors the benefits that were to be provided in the scheme. The reason for that is that the money for the PPF comes from other pension schemes, so any improvement in the benefits under the PPF is a bigger levy on employers who run other pension schemes. We should bear in mind that it did not exist much more than a decade ago. When it was set up, it was decided that it would offer broad compensation—100% above pension age, and 90% below, and indexation post-1997. That is the statutory requirement; schemes must index post-1997, and not pre-1997, and that is why the PPF does so.

My hon. Friend asked whether, because the firm was privatised, it should be made a special case. Of course I sympathise, but on the other hand vast numbers of workers now work for private companies that were previously nationalised. If AEA Technology were to be declared a special case, the pension funds of all the people who used to work for BT or British Airways and all the privatised companies would have to have special arrangements, too, with huge cost implications.

The question about the advice note given at the time is important. I have read the GAD note, and its introduction says, at 1.1.3:

“The note is not intended to suggest that any one course of action is better than any other. This would depend on individual circumstances, and if you are unsure of the most suitable course of action you should seek Independent Financial Advice which would take into account your particular circumstances.”

That was the point of the note. People could leave the money where it was, transfer it across to the AEA scheme or take a personal pension transfer. The note was explicit from the start that it was not designed to lead people down a particular route. In a sense, from the Government’s point of view it did not matter. The Government were going to transfer across the cash value of the rights built up, so they did not care whether people transferred across. There would have been no reason for GAD to write a note designed to lead people to a particular outcome. It would cost the Government the same either way.

[Sir Alan Haselhurst (Saffron Walden) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend understand that the frustration of the pensioners and those of us trying to represent them is compounded by the fact that there seem to be different players in the game, including another Department? We are grateful to him for responding to the debate, but perhaps he could nudge the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to reply to questions I tabled to try to get further answers for my constituents.

[Steve Webb]

I am very happy to ask colleagues at the Department to respond to my right hon. Friend’s questions. Obviously, as he said, the issue of PPF is a DWP responsibility, but insolvency policy—pre-packs and so on—is a BIS responsibility, and of course he should get prompt responses to his questions. If my hon. Friend the Member for Reading West still wants to intervene I am happy to give way.

[Alok Sharma]

I wanted to make the point that people affected by the scheme will be listening to the debate, and the bottom line for them is that what the Minister is saying—perhaps he will correct me if I am wrong—is that no compensation or redress will be forthcoming from the Government.

[Steve Webb]

Clearly, the Government have set up the Pension Protection Fund. As I have said, more than about 10 years ago, people in the situation we are talking about might have received a tiny fraction of the pension they had been going to get. In the present case, the base calculation for those over scheme pension age is 100%. I take the point about indexation, but it is 100%. It is 90% for those under scheme pension age. That is obviously still a significant part of their pension rights. Clearly, the reduction in indexation is important. I would not play that down.

The other thing to mention—my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds did not refer to it—is that at the moment scheme benefits are capped. There is implicitly a salary cap—a cap on the amount of money that someone can get through the scheme. We legislated during this Parliament, with the support of my right hon. and hon. Friends, for that cap to be raised for long-serving employees. One reason I was keen to do that is if a relatively large pension through the PPF is capped, it may not be because the person in question was a ridiculously high earner; it could simply be because of very long service with that employer. I believe that that is so for many of my hon. Friend’s constituents.

I felt it was unjust that the cap applied quite as brutally as it does in those cases, so we are now working on the secondary legislation necessary to get the cap lifted. It will rise by 3% per year for each year above 20 years of service, so long-serving employees will get a higher cap. We are working on the measure, and if we can get it done this year, we will. I suspect that realistically we are probably looking at this time next year. However, I do not have a pot of money to offer beyond that. Clearly, the PPF is there for all employees of private sector companies.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that announcement, which I think affected scheme members will warmly welcome. I mentioned one other matter: being contracted out from the state pension scheme. Given what has happened to the poor people involved, is there any change that can be made, so that they could be considered contracted into the state pension scheme, and therefore receive additional state pension?

[Steve Webb]

The challenge is that the flip side of being contracted out is that both the employee and the employer paid a reduced rate of national insurance, so lower state benefits accrue, and the scheme essentially replaces part of the state benefit, up to a certain amount, often called a guaranteed minimum pension. The employee benefits from low contributions and has part of the state pension replaced by the scheme pension. I hesitate to say this definitively, but the vast majority of scheme members will certainly get at least the guaranteed minimum pension, I would expect, through the equivalent—through the PPF, now. I cannot swear that that will be true in every case. It will be very difficult to unwind all of that and to go back and say, “We offset your reduced NI, so we work out how much you and the employer saved by reduced NI; we take account of that and give you a bigger state pension and we net off the saving.” That would be a very complex calculation. I think there are occasions when this sort of thing gets unwound, but they are exceptional, and I would not want to raise my hon. Friend’s hopes.

I want to reiterate my sympathy. I believe that the Government transferred a fair amount of money across at the time and fulfilled their legal obligations to provide matching—at least as favourable—benefits. Obviously, we all regret where things ended up. I do not believe that the company was pressured into pre-pack administration. I believe that at the time that was done to save jobs, which it did. I am pleased that PPF exists to provide at least a safety net, and I hope that my hon. Friends will welcome the fact that we have done what we could to improve it during this Parliament. That will benefit a significant number of people who worked for AEA Technology and unfortunately will not get the full pension that they expected.

11:29

Sitting suspended.