Pensions Bill
Baroness Drake Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)
My Lords, the previous two speakers have covered the main arguments that I was planning to raise, because there is concern—even from those close friends of the Minister, Steve Webb—on this issue. It is valid, therefore, to register that—there are certainly concerns in our group here this afternoon. The issues have been raised, including the issue of the inefficient market. The issue does not cover the consolidation of old pots. It considers the consolidation of the mobile or live pots. It does not raise the issue of what you do with those people in the labour force who are constantly changing jobs and the costs and the impact on their pension pots every time they do that. It also needs to address the fact that there is a smaller number of aggregators. I agree there is a problem with competition, but it is much easier to supervise them and make sure that the quality of those aggregators is adequate.
The final issue that needs to be raised is that there is a concern that without that supervision, people will be transferring into poor schemes or run the risk of doing so. They need to be protected. For all those reasons, it is right—and the noble Lord, Lord Turner, raised this point—that this is a time for reflection before we make any final decisions.
Baroness Drake (Lab)
My Lords, I will try not to duplicate some of the excellent contributions that have been made. Perhaps I could say that the areas of concern with pot follows member can basically be grouped into three categories. One is confidence in the basis for the Government’s decision to choose pot follows member; the second is differing views on what benefits the saver, and the third is the need to protect dormant pension pots that have already accrued.
When it comes to confidence in the basis for the Government’s decision, the noble Lord, Lord Turner, did a splendid job in identifying the limitations in the impact assessment. I stress that there are significant barriers to overcome before the Government can be confident about the superiority of the PFM model. The consequences of getting this wrong are absolutely huge.
Baroness Drake
My Lords, perhaps I may reiterate for continuity that the areas for concern with PFM can be grouped into three: confidence in the basis for the Government’s decision, differing views on what benefits the saver and the need to protect dormant pots already accrued.
When it comes to the basis for the Government’s decision, where are the significant barriers to be overcome before the Government can be confident about the superiority of the PFM model? The consequences of getting this wrong are huge. Yet the transfer model is in the Bill when there are so many conditionalities still to work through, and confidence in securing lower charges, which is the main benefit claimed for the PFM model, are by no means assured.
PFM requires effective pan-industry collaboration, but what if that is not forthcoming? Are the Government confident that they can overcome industry inefficiencies and conflicts of interest, so well articulated by the noble Lord, Lord Turner? The DWP is working with the industry to find an IT solution to match pots to members. There are significant technical challenges to overcome, standardisation to be achieved and the industry as a whole has to reach a consensus that prioritises the savers’ interests. If and when that is achievable are unknowns, but the Bill locks us into pot follows members.
Some providers will have an interest in getting rid of small, less profitable pots but will also have an interest in setting a pot size cap to defend their more profitable pots. They will have a natural antipathy to an aggregator with a pot cap that increases to a certain level. However, the pot limit chosen for automatic transfer will affect the number of separate pots that a saver builds up over their working life. It is one of the issues that goes to the heart of the efficiency of the aggregator model or the consolidation model chosen. Depending on the assumptions about the aggregator or how many active member and dormant-member pots that it has, the administrative savings can be greater than those that have been estimated in the impact assessment.
The department comments in its impact assessment that, overall, the results of its modelling suggest the aggregator scheme will achieve slightly less consolidation than PFM, but that needs to be set against the greater control that an aggregator scheme could provide in mitigating other risks that come with an automatic transfer mechanism. It would also be interesting to see the results of modelling that includes today’s dormant pots. I would like to come back to this. Equally, pot follows member cannot be implemented without raising quality standards, or the Government risk transferring the savings of millions of ordinary people into myriad schemes over which they currently have little quality control.
Even if the Government succeed in getting all schemes to a minimum quality standard, there will be a wide range between minimum standard and best practice. For example, consider a modestly paid worker who leaves a good scheme provided by a major retailer and goes to work for a two-person employer running a small shop, whose workplace scheme has higher charges, poor governance and a less suitable investment strategy. Would it really be wise to default several thousands of pounds of the worker’s savings into the new employer’s scheme? Regulation could set standards for aggregated schemes above the qualifying standards for automatic enrolment schemes, raising those standards in order to mitigate the risks that can occur on transfer.
Against that, PFM increases the regulatory burden to oversee a myriad schemes into which automatic transfers would be made, rather than focusing on leveraging very high standards in a few aggregated schemes. There is the potential for significant burdens on employers involved in transferring small pots to any number of schemes. Under PFM, every scheme would potentially need to be capable of communicating with every other scheme. Aggregators could pose a lower burden, as there would be—or could be—a much smaller number of such schemes.
Automatic enrolment was intended to carry a lighter regulatory burden for employers, especially SMEs, but this seems to be rowing in the opposite direction. The National Employment Savings Trust, which embraces the most transient low to moderate market, could consequently face higher administrative costs as a result of PFM. What is the consumer detriment to NEST members whose pots are transferred into the schemes of new, small employers, and out of the protection of the high governance standards in NEST?
With pot follows member schemes, the department expects that over the long run average charges would reduce as efficiency savings are made by the industry, but a reading of the impact assessment lacks confidence. Paragraphs 67 to 69 list some of the risks to which I have referred, but paragraph 70 concludes rather sweepingly that,
“the Department would expect the gains and losses from differences between scheme charges and investment performance to cancel out on average”.
When it comes to savers benefitting through lower charges from the administrative savings that providers may make from PFM, paragraph 71 comments that,
“there is a risk that some providers will not experience the resource savings projected”.
Paragraph 72 reminds us of the,
“uncertainty surrounding the assumption over the savings that providers will make”.
This is not the firmest of springboards from which to lock into a solution on the front of a Bill. On the differing views of what benefits the saver, PFM does not currently accommodate people who leave the labour force or become self-employed, as they have no employer scheme into which to transfer their pot. Their ex-employer may nevertheless default them into a poorer personal pension because they do not allow ex-employees in their existing scheme, which I must say is a growing trend. What of women who leave to become carers, move to a new employer, or who work part-time but because of the level of the earnings trigger are not auto-enrolled into the new employer’s scheme?
As has been argued by NAPF and others, pot follows member increases the risk of charges and transaction costs being incurred on the whole pension pot, rather than on the incremental amount saved with the previous employer. If the saver works in an industry characterised by frequent job changes they will be more vulnerable to these risks, which an aggregator could reduce.
Even where individuals choose to transfer to their new employer’s scheme, they face supply-side barriers. Transfers can take weeks if not months, and complexity and lack of standardisation combine to cause delay and increase costs. At decumulation the buying power of a larger pot can be harnessed by the individual, but the buying power is even better if open-market options can be exercised in bulk. Aggregators could facilitate and do this.
I turn to the third element, which is the need to protect dormant pots that have already been accrued. A key weakness in pot follows member is that it excludes existing dormant pots. An aggregator could pool an individual’s dormant and live pots because aggregation would not depend on an active scheme member moving to a new employer. Pot follows member at the point of introduction only consolidates live pots with future live pots. Today’s dormant pots are completely ignored. No start date has been set for pot follows member, as my noble friend Lady Sherlock has indicated, but by 2016 some five years’ worth of dormant pots will have been built up under automatic enrolment, and they will be excluded from the PFM proposition. The summary of the impact assessment points out that those with dormant pots before the start date will,
“remain in their existing scheme”.
That is a key weakness in this solution. Equally, it cannot be right that they should stay with their existing scheme in every instance because some employers will simply default these pots into alternative arrangements anyway if the former employee does not voluntarily transfer. If they are not allowed the option of access to PFM or the aggregator, the employer may well default them anyway into a personal pension.
Finally, the issue of pension pots is not only a future one, it is also one of legacy. Quite a lot of work is being done on standards and reviewing legacy pots by the DWP and the OFT, and there is work to come out of the FCA. I would ask this question: is there to be no synergy on the solution to transferring small pots post-2016 under auto-enrolment, and the solution to the problems that may be revealed in the audit of legacy schemes arising from the OFT investigation? Is it really going to be a set of parallel lines in looking for the solutions to cover the legacy problem, which could also be in auto-enrolment savings pots because of the 2016 dateline and what evolves in the future?
Amendment 62ZC clearly maintains the power of the Secretary of State to make arrangements for the transfer of pension pots, because everyone sees the compelling need to have some way of aggregating or consolidating these small pots. This amendment provides an opportunity to rethink the model to be chosen, but it does not of itself substitute an alternative model. The Government can eventually decide on the alternative model, and new primary legislation would not be needed—but it would not lock us in. The effect of the amendment would not be to lock us in to the PFM model at this stage. The reason for that is, I would say, because the case is not proved, members’ interests are not truly being defended, and there is no synergy with any dormant savings that may exist prior to the implementation of PFM before 2016. I believe that all these issues need much more consideration.
Baroness Turner of Camden (Lab)
My Lords, I have not spoken on this item hitherto except briefly at Second Reading. In my opinion, it is one of the most important issues before the Committee. That is because it is quite obvious that the Government want people to save. Everything they have been telling us about pensions indicates that they want people to save. What happens if people do save, but then they transfer jobs? Nowadays, of course, people do not stay in the same job for their lifetime. They may have several or even many changes of job in the course of a career. What happens to the pension pots that they accumulate? If there is no safety in those pension pots, the whole thing will be a disaster. I support strongly what my noble friends have said. It is clear that this is something that requires a great deal of attention.
Is the regulator to have more powers to deal with this? It is obvious that you cannot have a situation in which pension pots are put at risk because there is no way of handling the market or for dealing with people who will be forced to make choices for which they do not have the necessary skills or experience. They cannot make the right kind of choices and they may end up with a bit of a disaster instead of a reasonable pension, or even a reasonable lump sum to place with another pension provider. Again, I hope that the Government will take seriously what has been said in this debate. It is a very important issue.
Baroness Drake
Will the Minister accept that, whereas getting every automatic enrolment qualifying scheme up to a minimum standard is an excellent aspiration, getting everyone up to a minimum standard is not the same as setting a very high set of standards for a scheme that you are using to default people’s pensions into?
Lord Bates
The Government are not averse to excellent aspirations in a whole range of policy areas but in that particular area we need to look at the issue of the quality. In many ways, this goes back to the introduction of auto-enrolment, when perhaps it should have been the case that scheme quality was dealt with at that time. That would have made an awful lot of sense.
Baroness Drake
I do not want to get into that political debate because there might be some merit in what the noble Lord said. One of the core issues is that a default pension scheme was not chosen but I do not want to drift there. However, it does not matter who should have dealt with the minimum standards for qualifying schemes and when. If the Government are going to take to themselves the power to say, on behalf of millions of people in this country, “We will automatically transfer”, then the governance standards required in the scheme receiving the pots transferred under those terms have to be pretty high, do they not?
Lord Bates
Yes, and our hope and belief is that there will be higher standards. That cannot be issued by diktat and has not been covered. We are simply giving the powers and setting out the framework as to how we will go about that, but that discussion has to be had with the pensions industry. The conversation is ongoing and we will certainly be reporting on that progress.
I turn to some of the specific points that have been raised. The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, talked about the level of support and seemed to be fairly sceptical about whether there was any.
Lord Bates
The noble Baroness always asks an honest and genuine question, and I am trying to give an honest and genuine response, which is to say that we are not necessarily comparing like with like here. Although people understand how the pot-follows-member scheme might work—in other words, they will have just one pot, and everything will be transferred into it—they do not necessarily understand what the noble Baroness is proposing in terms of alternatives, whether they are single, multiple or virtual aggregators. Therefore, to give a clear-cut position on that is somewhat difficult.
It was drawn to my attention today that Adrian Boulding of Legal and General, one of the largest pension providers, in today’s Pensions Expert, formerly Pensions Week, says:
“the concept of your pension pot following automatically to a new employer is now not far off. The long-term benefits of people having ‘one big fat pension pot’, as the minister likes to call it”—
I think the Minister he is referring to is my right honourable friend Steven Webb—
“will be greater consumer engagement, more informed decisions, greater buying power and better pension outcomes. All well worth striving for”.
Lord Bates
He might say that but he is one of the providers and I therefore think that that is certainly well worth listening to. Another reason why we have come to this conclusion is because there is a great deal of uncertainty about what is happening out there. Auto-enrolment in pension schemes has been a huge success and the previous Government deserve credit for introducing it in the 2007 and 2008 Acts, based on the recommendations of the Turner commission. The price of the success of auto-enrolment is that it is creating a larger number of smaller pension pots as people move on. Figures have been quoted of there already being 370,000, and the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, has talked about a future figure of 600,000. That means that the need to make a decision is more urgent than ever. The noble Baroness was asking, “What does the industry think? What are people actually thinking?”. Pensions Expert, in its comment and analysis section said:
“If last year was about policy, then this year it is going to be all about making things work. Government have now clearly set the direction of travel. The success of auto-enrolment—in terms of low opt-out rates—means even more small pots are going to be created than were expected. Previous estimates that auto-enrolment would create around 370,000 new pots of less than £2,000 each year now look woefully low”.
They are very clear in what they are saying: they want direction. That does not mean to say that that direction cannot be changed by a future Government—just that they are getting clear direction. We consulted about it in 2011; in 2012 we issued a response; in 2013 we actually said what we were going to do. It seems as if finally, the industry—and, we hope, members—are getting their heads around the fact that this is the preferred option and the route that we are going down to ensure that we actually make it work.
Lord Bates
The noble Lord makes my point: it is more difficult to understand. What are we trying to do? We are trying to make it simpler. We are trying to get people to be able to understand it. That is one of the reasons why it appeals to people. They will only ever have one pension pot; under the other scheme they may have several; they will be able to keep track of that and follow it through. Anyway, we can discuss and debate that, but in all of the consultation that was undertaken, it was clear that there was a strong view in favour—not only from the respondents of the consultation, but also in the opinion polls that followed from the industry.
The noble Lord, Lord Turner, raised the important issue that pot follows member fails to deal with high charges. We strongly agree that driving up scheme quality is of paramount importance. This is an issue wider than just a scheme used for transfers in the aggregator model, but actually should be something that applies to all, to set minimum standards across a broader range of schemes. Therefore, in doing so, it would benefit not just those affected by these pension pot transfers, but also the existing members of those schemes.
The noble Lord, Lord Turner, said he did not accept the pot size comparisons that were being put forward. He spoke about the £2,000 limit: why was it £2,000? We actually consulted not just on £10,000: we consulted on £20,000, £10,000, £5,000, all the way down to £2,000 and even £1,000, which is similar to the amount that is currently used in the Australian model, which is often cited in this context. In all of those different levels, pot follows member came out ahead of the aggregator in terms of individual responses.
Baroness Drake
I would not presume to speak for the noble Lord, Lord Turner—I learn from him, not the other way around—but the point he was making was that one of the Government’s arguments against aggregator was that they would have to limit the pot size, which would introduce inefficiencies, because if they did not do so, it would distort the market. He was saying, I think, that he did not necessarily accept that that was a compelling argument against aggregator.
Lord Bates
It is a shame that the noble Lord, Lord Turner, is not here to respond to that himself or to clarify the point, but I take the clarification from the noble Baroness about where he was going. On the issue of how to drive down costs, the noble Lord referred to the potential and mentioned some horrendous numbers—25% or 30% of accrued pension disappearing in charges and how low it was possible to get that. There are some very interesting findings, which we are consulting on at present, about how technology would be a key ally in this. The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, asked about this too, wondering whether we preferred a paper-based system or an electronic system. Our preference, based on the current evidence, is invariably towards electronic, because there are associated costs every time you push a bit of paper around. I was interested to read in various articles that you might be able to get the figure for the entire transaction of a transfer down to £105 for both transmitting and receiving the amount if you do it electronically. There needs to be an electronic element to this and that probably points in the direction of a database. We are still consulting on that. We are open to advice, but that is probably something on which the industry will have to offer views.
Pensions Bill
Baroness Drake Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Drake (Lab)
I thank the Minister for taking the opportunity to address some of the issues we were concerned about—we ran out of time, in effect—in our previous Committee session. My major concern in this debate has been the sufficiency of protections when a statutory override is given or is exercised. It sets a precedent and I am sure that this will not be the last statutory override we are going to see in the pensions arena over the next three or four years, given some of the agenda items we know are coming our way.
I am genuinely concerned that what is proposed or what we can see is weak. The Minister said that he expected that the override would be used in exceptional circumstances. To an extent that is true, because if the sponsoring employer does not need, as a requirement of the scheme, to get trustee consent, there is no need for a statutory override. I had conceded that point in my opening comment. Of course, there will be a need for statutory overrides where the scheme’s rules do not allow what is being proposed on the recoup arrangements, or where trustee agreement is required and the trustees do not want to give their consent.
There are expressions of hope that somehow this consultation will take place and everybody will act appropriately and only in extremis—having gone through due process but finding barriers in the way—will the employer be able to invoke the statutory override. Of course, the Minister has no idea how employers will behave in practice in individual schemes. One hopes that they will all consult, but some may be in a hurry and some may simply see that they are not required to consult or gain trustee consent. A statutory override is being put in the Bill without, as far as I can see, an explicit requirement to consult—merely an expression of hope from the Government that it will take place. That worries me deeply.
The other area about which I remain concerned is the fact that the regulations will still be subject to a negative procedure. Again, we face key issues about the value of what the employer can recoup, and this would be setting a precedent on a significant issue. The Minister conceded that these are complex issues, and that is right. In multi-employer schemes, if the decision is taken to amend the protected order status for certain employees if there are shared cost arrangements, one can see the multiplicity and complexities that could arise. They would arise anyway, but they will arise.
We have no clear indication from the Government about how they will value what it is that can be recouped. As I asked when speaking the other day, is it the net or the gross loss? Will it be crystallised in terms of the 2016 value of the rebate? These are quite significant issues. On one level, setting out some actuarial assumptions in the regulations may be a good thing, although we would perhaps want to see the actuarial assumptions first. But we have no way of seeing them and when we do, the regulation will be subject to the negative procedure.
I know that the Minister said that there would be a full consultative exercise. Consultative exercises are important and I do not wish to detract from the importance of their taking place, but we all know that they can be dominated by organisations that have the capacity, the means and the interest to dominate them. I just hope that in the consultation exercise fair regard is given to the views of employees and trustees.
Baroness Drake
I was drawing to a close. I have a final point on the negative procedure. In response to my suggestion that there could possibly be time limits on consultation in order to meet the spirit of what I aspired to achieve before the constraint of April 2016, the Minister said that seemed too prescriptive and asked why one would want to put constraints on the consultative process. It seemed rather contradictory to say that one cannot go for negative procedures because affirmative procedures take too long and could push up against the efficient way in which employers could adjust in time for April 2016. If the balance were a trade-off between defined periods or timetabled periods of consultation with the employers and the opportunity to deal with the regulation by affirmative procedures, it would be fair.
Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)
Like my noble friends, I am grateful to the Minister for engaging more generally with the issues of statutory override in his remarks in support of Amendment 44. That has been of some assistance to the Committee. It is obvious from the engagement he has already had with my noble friends that they believe that to be the case. I, too, wish to be associated with the words of thanks to the Minister for the offers of further briefing and engagement. They will be taken up.
Before I take advantage of his generosity to ask him a few additional questions, one of the advantages of anticipating that he would do this—because he was gracious enough to indicate that he was prepared to do it—was that I was able to read the official record of the previous debate we had in Committee, and there are one or two things that occurred to me that he could expand upon.
Before I turn to that, I shall deal somewhat formally with government Amendment 44, which I accept is a consequential amendment. I have to say—I do not expect the Minister to engage very fully with this—that reading the statutory provision which he seeks to amend, the section of the Pensions Act 2004, I am slightly at a loss to understand why the amendment is necessary. It makes the precise provision more elegant, but I am not sure that it changes much of the content. It is genuinely consequential. Section 258(2)(c)(ii) already contains these words, although they are further qualified.
In the more general debate I shall try to be complementary to the points already made and not go back over the issues that my noble friends have addressed, although I have some notes here which are similar to some of their observations. I turn first to the issue of whether it is appropriate to deal with the regulations anticipated by these provisions by affirmative procedure in your Lordships’ House and in the House of Commons, or by negative procedure, and consequently whether it would be appropriate to deal with the limited issue of the extension of the period by negative or affirmative procedure. It seems to me, first, that it is improbable in the extreme, given the way the Minister has described these regulations in terms of their comprehensive nature, their complexity, and the difficulty associated with understanding them, that they will not be debated in some form in both Houses. It is unlikely that there will not be a desire to engage with some aspects of them to—at the very least—achieve some further clarification.
My second point to the Minister is that it seems to be counterproductive to the argument that negative procedure is appropriate to go to such length to explain just how complicated the regulations are. It seems to me that the more complicated the regulations are, and the more the primary legislation has to be supplemented by complicated regulations, the weaker the argument for doing this by negative procedure becomes. I suspect that that is why, reflecting on the Minister’s words, he referred again to the issue of parliamentary time. With respect to the Minister, getting parliamentary time in our current Parliament is the weakest argument possible.
I am struck by the number of times the House of Commons rises before what I consider to be its normal rising time. I do not know whether that is a function of the fact that the coalition Government have run out of agreement about what they can legislate on —that may happen; it is a perfectly natural thing with coalition government—but I am also struck by how much time is spent in the House of Commons debating what is now called “Members’ Business”. As far as your Lordships’ House is concerned, I am struck by the fact that we are all expecting—and I think we will see—that an extraordinary amount of time will be found to debate a Private Member’s Bill over the coming weeks.
If regulations are debated in the normal way, it seems to indicate an expectation that there will be no great competition for parliamentary time between now and the general election. In fact, I go so far as to suggest that the business managers of the respective Houses may have difficulty in filling the time they already have, so I do not think the argument about parliamentary time is all that strong. If the Minister is to continue to promote the idea that these regulations—complicated, difficult, comprehensive and substantial as they are—are still best dealt with by negative procedure, then, with all due respect, I think he will need better arguments than those he has already deployed.
Secondly, perhaps I may take advantage of the opportunity to debate these issues and ask the Minister to give some clarification about information that he gave us when we last debated these issues about the effect that the abolition of contracting out will have on people’s expectations. Early on in his contribution to our last Grand Committee, he came to engage with the issue of trustees and pension funds and their responsibilities. I will quote him fully, not in short. He stated:
“Referring to those private sector employees who are contracted out immediately before implementation, who reach state pension age in the first decade of single tier, around 75% of them will receive enough extra state pension to offset both the increase in national insurance contributions that they will pay over the rest of their working lives and any potential adjustments to their occupational pension schemes”.—[Official Report, 8/1/24; cols. GC 430–431.]
That is an argument that was deployed by the Pensions Minister in the House of Commons, too, when addressing that issue. It is clearly designed to allay, and does allay, the concerns of a significant number of people about the denial of their expectations. However, in col. GC 433, when the Minister was discussing the issue of protected persons under statutory override, he deployed a similar but different argument. I shall quote it to him, because I am interested in the difference, and what it actually means. He said:
“We also have to factor in that the design of the single tier reforms means that those with a long history of contracting out will in most cases build up significantly more state pension. Around 75% of people in the private sector who pay higher national insurance contributions and reach state pension age during the first two decades following implementation will receive enough extra state pension over their retirement to counterbalance the increase in national insurance contributions”.
He went on to say:
“This is a very complicated issue with many different and conflicting interests”.—[Official Report, 8/1/14; col. GC 433.]
But we know that.
Were these different ways of saying the same thing, or were they different things—and, if so, what is the difference? Why does he say “two decades” in one case and one decade in the other, and why is there a reference only to counterbalancing the increase in national insurance contributions in one while there is a reference to eventual benefits in the other? It may not be easy for the Minister to answer that immediately, and I apologise if it is not, but I would be interested to know whether he intended those two things to mean the same—and, if not, why there is a difference.
On the issue of protected persons, in col. GC 433, the Minister addressed my question about the defeated expectation that the decision that the Government promised following the consultation would be made clear to Parliament. He told the Committee that a decision following the consultation about protected persons would be made as soon as possible, and that when it was made, Parliament would be informed. But what he did not say was important. The Pensions Minister in the other place said at one stage that it would be done in the summer of 2013—and we know that that is now long gone. No matter how generous one might be with Governments who use seasons to give an indication as to when something might be done—and having been a Minister myself I know how wise it is to do that sometimes—in no one’s view are we still in the summer of 2013.
The Pensions Minister gave both the Standing Committee and the whole House of Commons to believe that, at the very worst, a decision may be made when the Bill was still before Parliament. That is not a phrase the Minister used. Was that deliberate or can he repeat the phrase? It is important for the 60,000 people who consider themselves to be protected persons. Their expectation is that the decision and therefore some engagement with the consequences of that decision will still be a live issue while the Bill is still before Parliament.
Lord Freud
I am grateful to noble Lords for their observations. I shall first take the query from the noble Lord, Lord Browne, about whether Amendment 44 is needed. I am conscious of his forensic skills in looking at particular bits of legislation in this area, and I therefore take his warning seriously. What it does is to remove a defunct reference on which legislation is worded. The default test is to meet the statutory standard. Actually, the legislation could work without this particular amendment, but it is confusing to those applying legislation and would leave an out-of-date reference on the statute book. The noble Lord, as usual, has picked up something quite clever.
He also picked up another clever thing: that I mis-spoke about my decades. I should have said two decades in each case, so I am pleased to correct that, and impressed that I was picked up.
On the negative procedure issue that the noble Lords, Lord Whitty and Lord Browne, and the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, mentioned, at this stage I do not have anything to add except to say that we are genuinely concerned about timing if the affirmative procedure is used. But that may be something we have a chance to discuss in our briefing ahead of Report.
On the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, about the override being net or gross, as I mentioned in my letter on Friday, the intention is that the current rebate rate of 3.4% will be used for these calculations. Without reform, this rebate would change over time, but it is impossible to predict what would happen, and therefore creating a net value for the rebate in future years would be impractical.
Baroness Drake
I shall desist from arguing that point, as we are going to have a meeting, but it is such a wrong approach because it is an unexpected premium for employers. You can have net at the employer level and at the aggregate level—what employers would have to pay taking into account taxation and tax relief—as well as how you set the figure for NI overall. Individual employers would have been able to set the cost of the additional NI against their tax liabilities.
Baroness Drake
We are going to have another meeting, but the effect of what the Minister has just said worries me. Employers will be allowed to recoup the value that is crystallised in 2016, but everyone knows that if there had not been changes the post-2016 value would have gone down. In addition, the employer’s NI charges are an expenditure that can be taken into account and set against tax. If those two elements are not built in, is that not a little unfair in term of the rules for recoupment—a little imbalanced?
Lord Freud
I do not think that I am in a position to say anything further, but we will pick this up later and if we cannot satisfy the noble Baroness at that stage, I will have to write very specifically on that matter and the tax implications.
Baroness Drake
It goes to my point about negative regulations. We just do not get the opportunity to address these issues because they are not drafted.
Lord Freud
I hear the point. Clearly we will be looking at it some more.
On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, about whether the override can be used for retrospective changes, the answer is no. That is contained in paragraph 3 of Schedule 14, which prohibits changes that might adversely affect subsisting rights; that is, rights to benefits already accrued.
On the noble Lord’s point about whether this undermines schemes, the override has been introduced precisely so as not to undermine schemes. Employers have told us that without the override, they would close schemes; the override is there to help them find ways of avoiding that.
On the protected persons question from the noble Lord, Lord Browne, I agree that it would be most unusual if the Government were not able to notify Parliament of their decision before the Bill completes its passage.
The noble Lord had a query about the rights of trustees to challenge. They could apply to the courts for direction, because amendments to the rules are not valid if they are beyond limits. Costs fall to the scheme, and ultimately the employer pays.
I hope that I have covered all the issues. Clearly this is an area of some interest and we will be spending more time on it.
Baroness Drake
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 52, 55 and 58. I acknowledge that increasing the state pension age consistent with increases in life expectancy is part of delivering a sustainable state pension system. For the regular reviews of the state pension age rules, however, we also need to ensure that a clear and wide range of relevant factors is considered and that there is clear and authoritative public presentation of the evidence to inform that debate, while recognising, of course, that the Government of the day will determine the policy that is brought to Parliament.
Intergenerational fairness requires that each generation should enjoy a roughly similar proportion of adult life in state-supported retirement, and we may well see newer and higher projections for life expectancy in the future which will bring huge challenges to how our society operates. For example, who knows where advances in modern medicine will take us in terms of life and health expectancy? State pension policy clearly has to be robust, in the face of not just increasing life expectancy but major uncertainty about how fast that increase could proceed. However, I am also concerned that increasing the state pension age should not be seen as the silver bullet for automatically delivering sustainability without considering some of the complexities and collateral consequences which need to be addressed at the same time.
This requires a range of factors to be considered in the periodic review of the state pension age. My noble friend Lady Hollis has clearly identified these factors, and I shall add arguments about why it is important that they are in the Bill. On average, life expectancy is increasing and yes, on average, ageing appears to be healthy, but averages do not tell the whole story. There are major inequalities, as has been articulated. Life expectancy varies significantly by socioeconomic class and while it has risen significantly in all social classes, there are widening absolute inequalities. Lower socioeconomic groups live for fewer years post-retirement, a smaller percentage of which appears to be free of sickness or disability, and they are far more likely to leave the workforce early for health reasons. In part, this reflects differences in key lifestyle predictors of future health.
The key implication is that there may be limits to the feasibility of across-the-board increases in the age of retirement from the workforce, particularly if the increases are more than proportionate to the increase in life expectancy of particular socioeconomic groups. Similarly, for those who are healthy, since the state pension accounts for a larger share of their total retirement income, this suggests that an increase in the state pension age would be most likely to induce lower income workers to work longer and less likely to induce higher income ones.
It is important to understand how trends in life expectancy and health by socioeconomic class will develop in the future. Certainly, figures indicate some significant differences in life expectancy and healthy life expectancy between regions. The recent figures, kindly provided, show that there is a widening gap between local authority areas with the lowest and highest life expectancies at age 65. Of course, one can speculate on the causes of these differences—major industrial shocks, unemployment rates, specific health problems and cultural and behavioural issues. However, if one looks below age 65, lower socioeconomic groups are also not participating equally in the significant reductions in death rates between the ages of 45 and 65.
An optimist could argue that the major occupational sources of ill health that played a large role in previous generations, such as coal mining or heavy industry, and whose impacts can still be seen in the regional incidence of unemployment, will decline in importance. Conversely, a pessimist would stress that the increasing divergence of some lifestyle factors, continuing differences in working conditions and new labour market features may offset some of these positive developments. The issue therefore is whether policy levers can be deployed to mitigate the disproportionate impact of a rising state pension age on lower socioeconomic groups.
Variable state pension ages may not be an appropriate response for addressing the significant differences in morbidity, life expectancy and early departure from the labour market. However, where differences exist a response is needed. Simply ignoring them is, in itself, a default public policy response with potentially negative consequences for many people. Measures need to target reducing health inequalities but the welfare system needs also to be sensitive, efficient and protective in supporting those for whom working longer is problematic because of their class and health. If these inequalities persist or widen should, for example, the age of eligibility for pension credit be lower than that for the state pension itself?
The UK state pension system, even with these reforms, will not be particularly generous in relative terms. Its focus is poverty prevention rather than an income replacement system. The value of the single tier will be only a little above the guaranteed credit. Yes, it will be the foundation for private saving to enable people to achieve a reasonable level of replacement income but it will be some years before auto-enrolment delivers the necessary savings levels. We are still only staging and phasing its introduction. Meanwhile, lower socioeconomic groups will still be facing a greater likelihood of ill health and earlier exit from the labour market as they get older.
Understanding the extent to which increases in life expectancy are accompanied by increases in healthy life expectancy, monitoring inequalities between socioeconomic classes and regions and identifying the implications for policies associated with the evolving policy for state pension ages will remain an important part of any review. The key responses should include a strong focus on health service and occupational health policies and on the measures to reduce the life expectancy gaps and to compress morbidity. The long-term aim must be to narrow health inequalities rather than treating them as permanent barriers. We should aspire, for example, for the men in Glasgow and Liverpool to have as good an average life expectancy as the men in Kensington and Chelsea, or even those in East Dunbartonshire. Policy needs to be designed to be both equitable and affordable in the face of whatever rise in life expectancy actually occurs. Higher pension ages are essential but are not in themselves a sufficient response.
Increasing labour market participation by older workers is, equally, an integral part of sustainability. Analysis of trends in average age of retiring from the labour market and in employment rates among older people by gender, region, occupation and socioeconomic class is required to understand the extent to which increases in state pension age are accompanied by increases in employment. Unless increases in state pension age are accompanied by higher labour market participation by older workers, then the effective contribution of those pension ages to public expenditure pressures will be weakened, GDP will be lower and other benefit expenditure could well increase. However, major inequalities in life expectancy and health may make across-the-board increases in retirement ages unfeasible unless these differences disappear over time.
The policy of raising the state pension age needs to be accompanied by measures that facilitate higher labour market participation by older workers, because barriers certainly exist. Take, for example, the position of some women. Although women have a higher average life expectancy than men, the figures also reveal that the gap between them is narrowing. The gap between women in higher and lower socioeconomic classes is increasing and women’s participation in the labour market has reached a plateau, partly because of care requirements and the cost of care provision, particularly childcare. Older women are increasingly looking after their elderly parents or grandchildren. An older woman’s earlier age of retirement from the labour force may, for example, be the price paid so that her younger daughter or son can be economically active.
The cultural biases against older workers are often embedded in personnel practices and employers’ assumptions. Take training as an exemplar. The evidence suggests that employer-provided training is skewed towards younger workers, with an assumption that some workers are too old to train. Yet the experience of workers in their 50s plays an important role because beyond the age of 65, participation in the labour market is driven by participation up to the age of 65. Once older people exit the workforce, they are much less likely to work again. The challenges facing business in embracing older workers will be very real. I recall quite vividly 10 years ago the CBI, anxious about that challenge, simultaneously arguing for an increase in the state pension age to 70 but a default retirement age under discrimination law of nearer 65. I described it at the time as a five-year gap between loss of employment rights and receipt of pension. The debate has moved on but that indicates what tensions will be there as industry responds to increased longevity and increased state pension age.
The extent to which increases in state pension age are accompanied by increases in labour market participation will inform government of what initiatives they need to take, be it tackling discriminatory cultures, financial incentives for later retirement, incentives to employers to employ and train older workers, flexible employment practices, cultural attitudes and health policies and changes to welfare policy and welfare payments themselves. Whatever decisions are made in response to the periodic reviews of state pension age, and however much desirable continuity in policy can be achieved, delivering both a fair and sustainable pension policy and level of public expenditure will and should be subject to fully informed debate continuing over time, in the light of new information on a series of relevant factors becoming clearly available and systematically considered.
Baroness Drake
Baroness Drake
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 54. Amendments 53 and 54 are tabled in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Hollis. They provide for a report on the periodic review of the rules about pensionable age, having regard to life expectancy and other factors, to be prepared by an independent commission.
There is an important role for an independent commission, while recognising that the Government of the day would determine the policy that is brought to Parliament. The demographic challenge poses unavoidable choices, which are partly for society to make and partly for individuals. However, for those choices to be rational and sustainable, they have to be informed, barriers have to be removed and a broad consensus has to be achieved. One of the useful roles of an independent commission is to present society with those difficult but unavoidable choices. It can spell out the facts and choices clearly and starkly. It can identify the complexities. That process will also assist the parties in reaching a political consensus.
Public debate on policy changes will be better focused and more likely to arrive at consensus if there is a permanent independent body charged with presenting to society the evidence and the issues. A commission can provide the public with a clear and comprehensive narrative about what is happening and what it means. Delivering a sustainable state and private pension system and responding to the demographic challenge are long-term projects that cannot be delivered in the lifetime of any one Government.
A consensus needs to be held over a long policy framework, because optimal outcomes take decades to come through. However, securing and maintaining a consensus will not be easy, because deciding the way forward involves important political judgments, and successive Governments have focused very often on immediate challenges. Trade-offs are the essence of political debate, but achieving some degree of consensus on core principles will be easier to achieve if there is an independent commission supporting that consensus. We know that the long-term management of public finances requires intensive debate now about the state pension age—but, notwithstanding the desirability of continuity in policy being achieved, the detail of pension and associated policies will and should be subject to continuing debate over time, in the light of new information becoming available.
Life expectancy and healthy life expectancy may change significantly from current forecasts, trends in voluntary private pension savings could turn out to be more or less favourable, and the participation rate of older workers in the labour force may prove problematic. As the information available changes, so the precise public policy direction can be refined, even if the overall framework of the system maintains as much continuity as possible. It is important that an independent commission should consider the sort of issues and complexities that we all referred to in the previous debate.
As to the type of commission, it should be small, so that the quality of engagement between commissioners is dynamic and qualitative, but sufficient in number to allow for wider input and for the stimulation of considerations that an individual by definition could not achieve. The commission could become a source of authoritative and independent presentation of the facts, and of the estimates of public expenditure consequences and of what future rises in the state pension age might be implied by the principle of pension ages rising in proportion to life expectancy increases. A commission could maintain a clear and steady focus.
The report could capture the key trends in life expectancy and the differences in morbidity, employment and retirement patterns among older people, by gender, region, occupation and socio-economic classes. This analysis would also allow early and regular identification of whether increases in state pension age are accompanied by increases in productive employment and/or a greater reliance on means-tested benefits and whether major inequalities in healthy life expectancy can make across-the-board increases in retirement ages feasible or unfeasible.
For example, if state pension ages rise and average retirement ages rise, state pension expenditure as a percentage of GDP will be reduced, not only by a pension expenditure reduction but by a rise in GDP. However, if pension ages rise and average retirement ages do not, the reduction in pension expenditure will be offset by other non-pension benefit expenditure and lower GDP. These issues are matters of some moment when we are looking to achieve sustainability in the light of what is a major demographic challenge.
Engaging the public is important. Individuals consistently underestimate their own life expectancy. Research confirms that. Individuals on average are unaware of, or do not believe, the projected increases in life expectancy—in some instances, even when the evidence is presented to them. Such attitudes make it difficult for people, particularly young people, to think rationally about the savings rate/retirement age/pension level trade-off that they personally and society face. An independent commission would assist in changing those attitudes and getting those key messages across in a way that very often government and political parties cannot do successfully.
The commission’s analysis could also identify the latest trends in private pension provision on average and across different gender, socio-economic and ethnic groups, and thus of the overall coverage and adequacy of pension provision. This analysis coming from an independent commission could assist in future debates about appropriate adjustments in employee or employer default contribution rates. This is a not insignificant matter and a key debate—one that people are probably feeling tentative about in view of other, wider considerations, but one which certainly an independent commission would help address, as well as helping the formation of a political consensus.
In the debates on previous amendments we heard much reference to data—the quality of the data, what they show, their integrity, whether they are sufficient and so forth. The quality of choices made and policy decisions taken is directly influenced by the quality, quantity and type of data that are available. An independent commission would be well placed to interrogate the quality of the data available and to make recommendations on the gaps or omissions in the data collected, and on the data needed to inform debate.
As the Minister conceded in an earlier discussion, there is a need to take a long-term view on these issues. In considering those long-term issues, long-term projections also need to focus on the uncertainty inherent in such analysis and on important sensitivity analysis. These are issues that a standing commission could focus on. It could assist in helping the debate and in helping the quality of government and individual decisions.
To repeat what I said at the beginning, one of the useful roles of an independent commission is to present society with difficult but unavoidable choices. It can spell out the facts and choices clearly, and it can identify the complexities and assist government and political parties in making the type and quality of decisions that are necessary in the light of the challenges that we face. I beg to move.
Baroness Sherlock
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 55 and 57A in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Browne of Ladyton. I shall speak also to Amendments 53 and 54 in the names of my noble friends Lady Hollis and Lady Drake.
As we heard in the very clear speech from my noble friend Lady Drake, Amendments 55 and 57A provide that the periodic review of rules on pension age should be prepared by an independent commission. I can think of no one better to suggest how a pensions commission might work than my noble friend Lady Drake, who was such a distinguished member of the Turner commission.
As I indicated previously, we agreed that there should be periodic reviews of the state pension age to reflect changes in longevity and the need for people to fund their retirement and also to achieve a fair balance between generations. The question is how to achieve that, and we have grave concerns about the way in which the Government are approaching this matter.
As it stands, the Bill simply says that the Secretary of State shall review the rules about pensionable age. That leaves us with some significant gaps. There is insufficient information about the kind of review mechanism that there might be. There is also insufficient detail about who will conduct a review or how it is to be done, and there seems, on the face of it, to be insufficient scrutiny by Parliament of any recommendations that emerge. Perhaps the Minister will clarify that for us when he replies.
At the heart of this lies a very important question: how do we enable people to have confidence in the system? If we want to encourage people to save for their retirement and we need them to save more, they need to trust the Government, to trust Parliament and to believe that their pensions are safe in our hands. The public need to know that they will not be at the mercy of political expediency and will be protected from any adjustments that might otherwise be made too quickly. After all, they may be nervous about this. There has been a succession of changes to pensions legislation, pensions levels and the state pension age. To suggest just one example, under the previous Labour Government the number of years of contributions required to get a basic state pension—
Lord Freud
The Low Pay Commission reports on a much more regular basis than the five years envisaged here. To pick up the timings that we have experienced, there is the example of Independent Public Service Pensions Commission. The noble Lord, Lord Hutton, was appointed in June 2010 and reported some nine months later, in March 2011. In the intervening period the noble Lord held two calls for evidence, undertook a research event, published an interim report and published his final report. It is clear that a lot can be done in the space of a year, and that is the kind of period that we imagine is about the right length of time required for a review.
NDPBs also tend to look at a wide variety of regularly changing data in the areas of longevity, healthy life expectancy, socioeconomic variations, trends in the labour market and so on, and they tend to be published on a much less regular basis than this. I want to be clear, though, that the groups indicated in Amendment 57A and many others should all be encouraged to participate and contribute in the process. Indeed, the review has been designed to ensure that both Parliament and stakeholders will have ample opportunity to participate in the process and shape the outcomes. Furthermore, because the reviews will be regular, stakeholders may indeed be able to better prepare and contribute than they are now.
Of course, if the Government decide to bring forward changes to the pension age, then those changes must be secured through primary legislation and subjected to the full scrutiny and approval of both Houses, as now. However, to have such extensive and political input at the data-gathering and analysis stage risks stymieing the process before information can even be provided to the Secretary of State. Indeed, the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975 prevents MPs sitting on many public bodies, precisely in order to avoid politics influencing their work.
Regarding the publication of this report, subsection (6) of this clause requires all reports prepared under the clause to be published. This means that both the Government Actuary and the report from the independently led review, including any recommendations that that component of the review makes, will be published, so all the evidence that has been taken will be made available. Every report will be laid in Parliament and published, including the report from the Secretary of State. As I said before, any proposed changes will require primary legislation.
It is for the Government of the day to put forward proposals resulting from the reports and to present any legislation to Parliament. Responsibility for publishing any overall report on the outcome of the review therefore has to remain with the Secretary of State. I hope that I have been able to provide some reassurance about how we envisage the review working and why. In this case, less is more. I urge the noble Baroness to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Drake
I thank the Minister for his comments. I certainly was not trying to overleverage my experience on the Pensions Commission; that was not necessarily the main driver for my amendment. I shall respond to some of the points that he made. In Clause 26 the periodic review on the state pension age is a standing arrangement, which is why it provides an opportunity to create an independent commission in support of that arrangement. It is not a case of a one-off job and then it finishes, otherwise it would not be in the Bill. It is obviously intended as a standing arrangement, which is meritorious; I do not disagree with that. However, that is materially different from a one-off commissioning of something. It says that if you are going to have this standing arrangement and periodic reviews and assess whether the current rules on state pension age are fit for purpose, that lends itself to being supported by a commission on a standing basis.
Again, on reading Clause 26 it is not simply dealing with the narrow issue of the state pension age rules, it is also quite clearly saying it will review other factors relevant to the review. The implication in that must be that the Government recognise that complexities would arise around the demographic challenge. That would need to be understood in order to influence policy decisions across a range of issues. Again, a standing commission would be able to assist in looking at that wider range of factors that would inform the review.
I also repeat the point I made in moving the amendment because it is really important. The long-term management of public finances, particularly in respect of responses to the demographic challenge, would be really helped by having a standing commission. The fact that so much progress was able to be made on a political consensus that we are still getting the reward from was because there was a commission. It was able to present the issues and the case to Governments and political parties, as well as the country as a whole, in such a compelling way that it drives, almost from a sense of political responsibility, a consensus on the long-term management of public finances on that issue. It would be a shame to lose that.
Sustainability is a long-term project. Secretaries of State change, Governments change, but as a society we want a political system that delivers rational policies that give us good long-term outcomes. The one thing that characterised pensions in the last 20 years of the previous century was the incremental decisions that Government after Government made about both the private and public pension system. When you stood back you could see the complexity and the dysfunctionality of what the political system, motivated as it might have been in each instance in a very positive way, created. Certainly, when employers started to withdraw from the private pension system it started to show the weaknesses of our political system.
If we are looking for long-term effective management of public finances, the sustainability of the private pension system and the demographic response over the long term this strikes me as a way to go forward. To take an anecdotal example, I remember telling my husband that I was about to go and tell the whole country that they had to work significantly longer and we could not even promise that even the first forecast of how much longer they would have to work would not be increased further in the light of experience. He thought that I was committing career suicide and could not believe that I could possibly do that. I explained to him that the evidence was so compelling and if one cared desperately about a pension system and the interests of the people in this country you had to have the courage to take that debate out to people.
I can remember the CBI being horrified at the thought of having to retain older workers. I can remember trade unions being mortified at the prospect of the default retirement age being raised or abolished because it was a stalking horse for raising the state pension age. However, because you had a commission you could have a much more positive influence on that debate. I remember, as I am sure the Minister will experience, lots of people from around the world, particularly in Europe, asking how the UK managed to get such a consensus from the country about the reforms that needed to be made to the pensions system and the state pension age in particular. I genuinely think that one of the reasons that was possible, compared with some of the problems that are being experienced in other countries, is because the analysis and the narrative that were taken out to people were not just the product of party politics. They were the product of a commission that sought to identify the issues and the choices on the basis that even if you did not make a choice, that by definition was a choice because you would be inevitably moving along a certain line.
I think that that is right. There are 60 million people in this country who have an investment over the very long term, either for themselves, their children or their grandchildren, so we must get this right. What is there to fear in trying to sustain the political consensus by having a group of independent people who assist that process by being able to assist with the narrative and identify the issues? It is that passion that makes me move the amendment, not just that I happened to be on a commission at a point in time. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Pensions Bill
Baroness Drake Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Drake (Lab)
I think that the Minister is right not to give advice as to whether or not it suits an individual to defer. It depends on their personal circumstances.
Lord Freud
I actually have very strong views on this matter but I think they are personal. I am going to utterly resist putting them on the record in this Committee but I would enjoy having tea with the right reverend Prelate and giving vent to my personal views at full force.
The Lord Bishop of Chester
My Lords, very few people on the Committee will know that the last time that I had tea with the Minister was in his rooms in Merton College when we were both first years in 1969, so it would be good to have another cup. Given the nature of this discussion, I wonder whether the Minister could at least agree to take the issue away and think about it. There are issues here that may need a bit of teasing out other than in the circumstances of this Committee.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I have amendments in this group that broadly support the line that my noble friend has been taking. She was right to try to prise open what the Government’s strategy actually is.
Everyone recognises that there are consequences of contracting out, but under this clause and schedule the Government are effectively giving carte blanche to employers to change established means of paying occupational pensions among private sector employees. Government Amendments 48 and 49 actually make that worse by making it pretty explicit that the full cost of that will, or at least can, fall on the employees so that not only are the employers given the right not only to avoid the consequences of that cost and place it on to the employees, which is likely to have the knock-on effect of people opting out of the schemes, but they are overriding the long-established system whereby such schemes are governed by trustees representing the employers, the contributing members and often the pensioners in those schemes. To override the whole system of pension trustees that we have had in place for the past 40 or so years with regard to private occupational pensions is a very serious step. There are particular consequences in the area where statutory protections are built in. Past Governments have given guarantees that can be overridden by this clause.
All this can lead us only to the conclusion that the Government have a strategy and are using the excuse of the other provisions of the Bill on state pensions to go further in destroying private occupational schemes. We discussed the knock-on effect in public sector schemes at our previous sitting but here we have, as my noble friend says, more than 1.5 million people still in defined benefit schemes who have benefited from them and have every expectation of continuing to benefit from them. On top of everything else, the Government are attempting to ensure that those schemes now fail.
There are other reasons why some schemes have been curtailed and there are other reasons why the future of such schemes, in some cases, looks fragile. However, this is a deliberate attempt by the Government to make matters significantly worse. The Government must think very seriously about that. This is why my amendments and those of my noble friend would delete the bulk of Clause 24 and Schedule 14. We recognise that we have to face up to the consequence of that, but it would force the Government to rethink this and do it in the context of an overall strategy towards occupational pensions, their governance and their future, which is not there at the moment.
This clause provides the possibility of the Government reassuring us that they have a strategy but, frankly, we need to see the outlines of that strategy before we finish the proceedings on this Bill. Otherwise, I think that the message to those outside will be that, if you are in an occupational pension scheme in the private sector, we will make it cost you more and the benefits will be less and, if you are in the public sector, the Government will not compensate for the costs that they are imposing on well funded public sector schemes, as we discussed last time.
There is an occupational pension dimension to the whole pension issue. In principle we support many of the changes that the Government intend to make to the state pension, but the other part of the equation also needs to be faced up to. Frankly, I have seen no sign of a government strategy to do that. These clauses and much of this schedule will only make matters very significantly worse.
Baroness Drake
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 38ZA, 39, 45, 46, 47 and 50. The amendments in this group pose three propositions: the first is not to give the power to employers; the second is to give it only to employers with trustee consent; and then there is the amendment that I propose, which would give the power to employers only if it was subject to an explicit requirement to consult with the trustees.
Quite clearly, abolishing contracting out means abolishing DB schemes. The national insurance rebates to both employees and employers currently run at 1.4% and 3.4% on a band of earnings, so they are not insignificant amounts of money. The Bill will give this statutory override to the employers effectively to recoup that loss of their NI rebate by a choice of one of two options: increasing the employees’ contributions or reducing the value of the future benefits to be accrued. Not all employers need this statutory override to make that adjustment. It is quite clear that the closures and benefit changes of the past 10 years are evidence enough of that. However, there will be some schemes where employers cannot do that without trustee consent. The Government are clearly seeking to provide an override where that trustee consent is required so that employers can proceed without it.
If one looks at the impact assessment, it is quite clear that there is now a green light as a consequence of this clause for employers to recoup the loss of their NI rebates through an increase in employees’ contributions. The assumption made in the impact assessment is that all employees active in DB schemes, who are impacted by this, will bear the cost of increased employer’s national insurance contributions.
Lord Freud
My Lords, I particularly enjoyed the stories of the noble Lord, Lord Browne, about his dealings with pensioners. I am disappointed that he and his silver tongue were unable to persuade against the pocket. After single tier is introduced, there will not be an additional state pension to contract out of. Employers with such schemes will no longer receive the national insurance rebate; they will pay the same rate as other employers and will have to continue to provide a pension scheme that is generous but which will therefore be more costly. To continue funding these defined benefit schemes and to keep them open without the rebate, employers will be forced to find other ways to reduce running costs. They may wish to reduce the future rate of accruals, or to increase employee contributions.
Employers have told us that, without the override, they will have to consider closing their schemes, particularly if they have no other way of offsetting the costs of contracting out. Clearly, members are not served by their pension schemes closing. It is vital that we support those employers who are seeking ways of offsetting the increased cost of national insurance, including where their scheme rules would not allow the change or where the consent of trustees cannot be obtained. We also recognise that trustees may be put in a difficult position if employers come to them with a request to reduce benefits or increase contributions.
Baroness Drake
On the point that trustees find themselves in difficult positions if they are asked to consider increasing contributions or reducing benefits, I am not sure whether the Minister appreciates what trustees have been doing in the past 10 years in addressing precisely those kinds of requests from employers.
Lord Freud
I understand what trustees in pension funds do and I understand that some of them find themselves in very difficult positions when having to address those issues.
Referring to those private sector employees who are contracted out immediately before implementation, who reach state pension age in the first decade of single tier, around 75% of them will receive enough extra state pension to offset both the increase in national insurance contributions that they will pay over the rest of their working lives and any potential adjustments to their occupational pension schemes. Such a move must be considered in this context.
In contrast to the figure that the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, and the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, were looking at—1.6 million in private sector schemes—regrettably, by 2016, we expect only 950,000 individuals to be affected. That figure is in the impact assessment at paragraph 128.
Amendments 37 and 38 would remove the statutory override power and prevent Schedule 14 from coming into force. The practical effect would be that an employer would be required to get trustee consent for the changes they wanted to make to their scheme should their pension scheme rules require this. For the reasons I have just set out, we feel the override is necessary.
Amendments 38ZA, 45, 46 and 47 of the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, relate to the calculation of the value of the employer’s lost national insurance rebate. For the statutory override to operate as intended we must balance two competing factors: first, safeguarding members from changes to scheme rules that go beyond offsetting the loss of the rebate; and, secondly, providing an override that remains workable for employers—otherwise in practice they will still be left with little real alternative to scheme closure. Schedule 14 sets out important safeguards in the Bill and includes powers to put further safeguards in regulations. Paragraph 2(2) of the schedule prevents the employer making changes beyond those necessary to recoup their increase in national insurance contributions. We intend for this amount to be calculated in accordance with regulations—allowing us to define annual national insurance contributions—and an actuary must certify that any changes do not recoup more than that amount before they are made.
Importantly, any proposed scheme changes cannot take effect before April 2016 and individuals’ accrued pension rights are protected by the Bill. The amount will be calculated in accordance with actuarial methods and I accept that that can be a changeable feast, as the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, pointed out. However, we intend to specify the methods and assumptions in regulations following consultation with the actuarial profession. We are working on the detail of the override regulations and are developing the legislation with stakeholders. We have shared an early draft of the key technical provisions of the regulations with the industry and will undertake a full public consultation on the full regulations as soon as possible. The override will not remove an employer’s obligations under existing legislation to consult their workforce in the usual way before making changes.
Amendments 38A, 39 and 50 refer to the role of trustees in the use of the statutory override. Legislating for trustee consultation risks unnecessarily complicating existing communication channels. It would be counterproductive to require employers to seek trustees’ agreement that the proposed changes recoup no more than the increase in national insurance costs. Trustees would be put in a position of either accepting or challenging the professional view of the certifying actuary. The proposal that the trustees could block the use of the override would negate its purpose. It is worth remembering at this point that, as with any significant alteration to pension schemes, existing legislative provision means that members must be consulted before any changes take place, which is a point I have made.
Where employers wish to make changes to their scheme, whether using the override or through existing scheme rules, it is in their interest, as my colleague Steve Webb said, to engage with their employees and scheme trustees. They will not want to make changes that are impractical or have unforeseen consequences for the scheme or themselves. We can see no reason why employers would not engage in the usual way without the trustees in this case.
We have placed a limit of five years during which employers may use the statutory override. This ends in 2021 but, as the noble Lord, Lord Browne, observed, that time limit may be extended by an order made by the Secretary of State. Based on all the information we have at the moment we believe employers who choose to use the override should be able to do so within this time limit. However, contracting out is complex and there may be unforeseen problems for some employers. An employer who is unable to use the override within the time limit, without the possibility of an extension, may have no option but to close their defined benefit scheme. This would be a compelling reason to use the power and we feel that an affirmative resolution procedure on this matter would not be a prudent use of parliamentary time.
Baroness Drake
I wish to clarify one or two points, if I may. The Minister said that these changes would still be subject to consultation with employers, by which I assume he is saying that they would be considered as listed changes and therefore trigger the listed changes regulations. What triggers that? Those provisions can be operated in a way that excludes the trustees, if the employer takes a certain route. I do not want to go into the detail; perhaps I can do so outside. I would like to understand how consultation with employers is triggered because I would almost certainly want to go on to say that what I think will be triggered will not be fit for purpose in a statutory override situation. I have a couple more points.
Lord Freud
Those are not straightforward points to answer and, given the time pressure we are under, I will write on those two matters.
Baroness Drake
I completely understand these technical matters. We are up against the clock but I think they need answering and I would want to respond to the answers. There could be an element of the positive in the second—on specifying the assumptions in the regulations—because it starts setting out the rules more explicitly. However, it appears that the Government are still proceeding on the basis that these are negative regulations. The trouble is that other interested parties cannot make an effective contribution unless this House has the opportunity to question those assumptions and those regulations. I have no idea what the delay implication would be of allowing this House to consider the proposed regulations and assumptions more actively when they are brought forward.
Secondly, I would still like an answer to what it is that can be recouped. Is it the definition of the NI rebate in 2016, or is it the NI rebate as it would evolve anyway over time under the current arrangement, meaning that, because of the reduction in the earnings element, it would contract?
Again, I do not want to get too much into protected persons but, on the fourth point, if one takes as an example the railway pension scheme, the Minister is absolutely right. Lots of people in that scheme do not have protected pensions, but they do have the shared cost. There are particular complexities that arise from shared costs and some other things as well, but I feel that there is no opportunity to flesh these out. I have spent some time looking at the railway pensions bill. Even if one did not want to challenge the Government on the principle, there are some complexities here. It is not easy just to adjust the contribution rate or to adjust the benefits in a shared cost situation and where there are variable accrual rates. How are we going to get a chance to look at these?
Lord Freud
My Lords, given our time constraints, I will pick up those issues—the shared cost and the rebate over time. With the negative and affirmative, there is a time saving and a certainty. The difference is that you get them in and, within a matter of a month, they are effectively law and they can then be prayed against, but they are in shape unless they are undone. Affirmative has to be approved. So there is quite a process and a time loss in going one way or the other, which I hope I have spelt out. Let me rush to—
Pensions Bill
Baroness Drake Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, this is an amendment about multiple jobs below the lower earnings limit, LEL. There are about 40,000 women and 10,000 men who we know about with two or more jobs each, each of which is below the LEL but which, aggregated, bring them above the LEL and should, I argue, bring them into NI and the state pension.
Who are they? Let me tell some of their stories: all people whom I have met, talked to and canvassed. They are rural women in their 40s with their youngest child over 12, who are patching together what we grandly call a portfolio, the components of which vary over the seasons in rural Norfolk. It might be six hours caravan or boat cleaning on the Saturday—handover day—during the summer, three small house-cleaning jobs during the week for the affluent incomer retirees on the northern coast, some mushroom or fruit picking for a few weeks and, during the winter, two or three evenings working at the nearest pub or newsagent.
One woman averages about 20 hours paid work a week, most of it at minimum wage—as much as she can manage given the danger of five to 10 hours a week travel time between jobs. She has no private car, there is extremely limited public transport in rural counties and she has teenage children to care for and feed. In any case, there are few if any decent 20-hour part-time single jobs, let alone full-time jobs, in rural Norfolk for unskilled middle-aged women without their own transport and with a family to care for. This could be her life for 10 or even 20 years.
Half the jobs in Norfolk, for example, are located in my city of Norwich, which is a 30-mile to 40-mile bus ride away for many people living near the coast, and buses are few. She will never be able to access those jobs, with their better pay and hours. She needs and deserves a pension, and if she cannot build one for herself she will not—this is key—be able to rely in future on any from her husband through the married women’s 60% pension.
A second person whom I met was a divorced Norwich woman in her 50s working as a receptionist for an alternative medicine practice, who told me that her employer would not allow her to work more than 15 hours a week, although she would like to because she enjoys the job, so that he can avoid paying national insurance. He pays three women each for 15 hours a week—because he works a long week—in order to avoid paying NI on any of them. At the time, she was topping up her income, although not her eligibility for BSP, by working extra hours in a florist’s shop. She was desperately worried about her pension situation but did not see what she could do about it.
Another woman’s work patterns are shaped by her caring responsibilities. She does not qualify for carer’s credit, but she fits some pieces of paid work around supporting three elderly relatives in my former ward, plus some cleaning and working in the local launderette.
All those women are working sufficient hours to bring them into the NI system for a pension but because they cannot aggregate them, they do not qualify. When some of us campaigned on this in the past, we were told, first, that you could not reasonably divvy up the employers’ national insurance if there were two or three such jobs, secondly, that the women would not want to pay class 1 contributions and that, in any case, they were few in number, only 15,000, and they were passing through. We were next told that it was a temporary problem for them and they had plenty of time to make up their missing years; finally we were told that they could always buy voluntary NICs and, if all else failed, there was pension credit.
The Government’s supporting papers rebut every one of those arguments and show them to be wrong. We now know that we have 50,000, not 20,000 people caught in this dilemma; two or three times as many. If we do not bring them into NI, they may well cost almost as much on pension credit down the line. That keeps more people in the means-tested legacy system, which we surely want to avoid. The second argument run by the Minister in the other place was that this was a temporary period of their lives. We simply do not know. The Minister is guessing. Some, certainly, may become entitled to a credit or move house into, say, the city of Norwich, and thus have a wider choice of jobs, and as a result may be able to come into NI, but others are stuck. Their patchwork life goes on for years because that is all that is available. We do not have the statistics for them, but 40% of the self-employed have been self-employed for more than 10 years. They include some of the poorest self-employed. The women I have described likewise tell me that they expect their position to continue for many years, often because they need the flexibility that it offers around their caring responsibilities or because they lack realistic alternatives, especially in more rural areas.
They can certainly buy voluntary NICs but, frankly, at £13 a week that is not usually feasible or realistic. It is five times more than we expect a self-employed man to pay. Bluntly, she probably cannot afford it. Is it fair? If she were working those 20 hours on the minimum wage for a single employer, she would get her national insurance but she would be below the PTT and probably would not pay a penny. She would come into national insurance without paying because she would come between the two thresholds. If she were on JSA or a disability benefit and not working a single hour, she would, again, get her NI and not pay a penny. Where she is conventionally self-employed, she will pay £2.70 a week and get NI. If she is employed with one employer, she will pay nothing and get her NI. If she is unemployed, she will pay nothing and get her NI, but because she works 20 hours a week, splintered, she will get nothing at all. Perhaps someone can explain to me why that is fair.
I accept that it has been hard to find a way through in the past, even for those who were sympathetic and did not dismiss mini-jobs as pin money. The Minister has never done that when we have been talking about UC and I am grateful to him. The Bill—bless it—gives us a way through. At last, it is now very simple. HMRC—and the Minister will know infinitely more about this than I do—is building real-time information. Rightly, we are giving the new state pension to all those who are self-employed: 4 million self-employed people will, I understand, gain significantly. Surely we are not going to say to them that we can afford to help 4 million self-employed people, largely men, but not 40,000 people with mini-jobs, mainly women.
Let us now class this woman as self-employed. If she pays the flat rate £2.70 a week, she can, by choice, buy herself a pension for the current year and opt in. We can discuss any backdating rules on retrospective purchase. Equally, we could, say, by regulations, agree that by working a certain number of hours—say, 16 or even 20—she conforms to JSA work search conditionality. She could, if necessary, discuss this with Jobcentre Plus—I have no problem with that—so that she meets the threshold. However, it would be absurd to say that to get an NI contribution she has to stop working 20 hours a week in real, convenient jobs and go and work in Poundland as part of an internship to meet work search conditionality. She is already doing 20 hours a week in work that fits around her caring responsibilities. In this way, she will qualify for a credit just as does someone on JSA who is not working at all.
UC may or may not be available to help her in due course. We do not know how many people it would apply to and by what route. In any case, it would be wrong to rely on it, given the current delays in rolling it out. Realistically, it may be several years beyond April 2016, although not too many, I hope—all years in which she continues to miss out. What number of women in a patch of mini-jobs does the Minister expect to still be unable to build their NI by 2020?
I want to make one final point. I have been describing older women, family women and often rural women, but I ask noble Lords to look around them. I think—it is only an estimate—that 5 million people are estimated to be on zero-hours contracts with uncertain hours, largely in the service sector and usually on the minimum wage. They work perhaps 10 hours one week and 20 the next, and they cannot run a regular job, as we understand the phrase, alongside it, as they always have to be available, so this involves evening and weekend top-ups. It is a major and growing problem in my view. Some may, over the year with one employer, come above the LEL. How many, I do not know. If the Minister has figures, that would be good. However, others on zero-hours contracts will not do that.
Employers love such a flexible, low-paid, semi-casualised labour force—what is not to like for them?—with staff patching together a living wage as best they can around their zero-hours contracts. The price paid is in tax credits from us. There is a burgeoning tax credit bill which, despite the wildly erroneous statements of the Secretary of State, does not come from those who do not get up in the morning but from the working poor, many of whom are on these contracts, as the Minister and this Committee know very well. That cost is paid by us in tax credits and by the worker in poverty, low wages and insecurity in their working lives, and poverty, insecurity and a relatively low pension in their retirement years.
The Bill gives us a way through, either by classifying them as self-employed or possibly by saying that they now conform to JSA conditionality. There are other ways I can think of by which we can do this, but this is a decent opportunity to rectify a problem that has gone on for far too long—that women who are doing their best for their family while contributing to the economy find themselves penalised. We can rectify that. It could be the decent and right thing to do, as I hope noble Lords will agree. I beg to move.
Baroness Drake (Lab)
My Lords, I support Amendment 11. It is always a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Hollis. The disadvantage is that she mobilises the argument so compellingly that one feels rather depleted before one even starts to come in to support her. I will try, in a slightly depleted way, to give support on the very important issue which she has identified.
In the numerous iterative debates on the UK pension system in recent times certain criteria key to the design of that system and appraising outcomes have held constant. One of these has been that it must work for women. We cannot wholeheartedly say yes to that, notwithstanding the reforms that we have seen in the Bill. Clearly there is still room for improvement, and two weaknesses are frequently referred to. First, the level of the earnings trigger set for auto-enrolment is too high and excludes too many part-time workers, mainly women. Secondly, women who undertake mini-jobs—each of which delivers earnings below the lower earnings limit of £5,668, the access point for the national insurance system, but which if added together would put them above that level—do not have access to the state pension system under the contributory system because there is no provision for people with mini-jobs to aggregate their earnings in a way that would allow them to enter the NI system.
If we strip that back to its essentials, a woman with two part-time jobs, earning £100 per week from each job, will not be accruing pension rights unless she is covered by some alternative credit arrangement. Someone who may be working fewer hours but earning £110 per week from one job would accrue pension rights. However, £100 equals about 16 hours on the national minimum wage, so if one was doing more than one mini-job, one would be doing a lot more than 16 hours. Yet in the way that the system operates, they are not allowed access to the NI system.
As my noble friend Lady Hollis so clearly explained, this amendment would allow women and men to aggregate income from two or more mini-jobs and opt to have a year treated as a qualifying year for state pension purposes, and to pay national insurance as though they were self-employed. Having said that, I note from the Peers’ briefing pack that the rate of national insurance payable by the self-employed will be a matter for the Government to decide closer to implementation. If the Minister is able to give us indications of the Government’s thinking on that, which would go to the efficiency of the solution, that would be helpful.
As my noble friend confirmed, the DWP analysis found in 2012-13 that 50,000 people—40,000 women and 10,000 men—had two jobs with a combined income above the lower earnings limit, but were not accruing qualifying years towards their pension. Those may be relatively modest numbers—although the real figure may be higher, given that these things are difficult to measure. However, fairness is not simply a function of the number of people affected, because the disadvantage for these people is very real. As my noble friend Lady Hollis pointed out, the changes in the contemporary nature of the labour market may indeed increase the incidence of what the noble Baroness refers to as a “portfolio of mini-jobs”. We are increasingly seeing an intensity of flexibility requirements within contracts when it comes to the hours of work that employers want in any one week. Certainly, therefore, we need an NI system and a state system able to reflect the developments in the labour market so that it stays fair for people who are working.
Pensions Bill
Baroness Drake Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I hope that Committee will forgive me if just for a second I revisit Amendment 3 and pension credit costs. I pressed the Minister, but he did not give me an answer—I would be very happy for him to write me—about the annual savings from each cohort of men falling out of pension credit and where those savings go to. That was not part of his reply and it would be good to know.
This amendment proposes a 2% head space between the new state pension and what someone would get on pension credit. Obviously, it is a probing amendment, a peg to explore what the future level of the state pension vis-à-vis pension credit will be, and to give us information about some of the winners and losers on the income analysis, on which I am sure that my noble friends will be pressing the Minister.
In particular, I want to focus on the issue of means-testing. As far as we know, eventually only something like 3% of the means-testing in the system will drop out as a result of the proposed changes. One of the great virtues of the new proposed pension was that by bringing together the BSB, S2P and pension credit, it was to leapfrog some means-testing. As my noble friend Lady Sherlock said, we had to use means-tested pension credit when we came into government because pensioner poverty for the bottom third was so acute and the number was so large that we could not financially manage a sufficient flat-rate rise for all. So we targeted our resources, and the policy worked. However, as my noble friend Lady Turner will remember, although we pushed the policy through, it was not without insistent, noisy and continuous haranguing from the late, splendid Barbara Castle, who used to sit right behind me, muttering very loudly to Muriel as I would reach some fancy point in policy, “What’s she trying to say now? What’s she trying to say now?”, to the great amusement and glee of those on the opposition Benches.
That policy removed hundreds of thousands of people from poverty, so pensioners are now less likely than any other group to come within that category of poverty. However, it came at a price. As we know, means-testing is disliked, especially by older people and, no, it is not the same as giving your income details to HMRC for tax purposes. It is highly expensive to administer and open to error—I will not say fraud—for this group.
Above all, as the Minister rightly and sympathetically identified in his previous answer to my noble friend Lord McKenzie, those entitled to pension credit, such as the self-employed unsure of their income or elderly widows whose husbands’ pensions have died with them and who have never handled the financial pension arrangements between them, do not always claim. Unlike lone parents, who are savvy and feisty about their benefits—well, usually—and have very high claim rates, pensioners do not. For example, fewer than half of those entitled to savings credit claim it. In the past, fewer than two-thirds of those entitled to council tax benefit claimed.
Endless studies were undertaken into why, and I congratulate the DWP on its fascinating in-house research published last year by Maplethorpe et al on whether we could get a significant increase in the take-up of pension credit if pensions were made to the department’s random sample of 2,000 entitled non-recipients automatically and a further 2,000 ENRs who were followed through by DWP visitors. That was an imaginative and welcome piece of research.
It is a pity that the results were, for everyone I think, really rather disappointing. The money was welcomed at the point but after the trial period of three months DWP had added only about 10% to the number claiming pension credit, which was useful but not a breakthrough, when pensioners were required to submit their own forms—in other words, take the initiative in a means-testing pension credit. As the research identifies, it is about stigma and difficulty with the forms, but also we have long found that if a pensioner had applied in the past for another means-tested benefit—HB, for example—and been refused, they thought they were ineligible for any other means-tested benefit so did not apply. If a friend or member of their family had been refused after applying, they assumed that the case applied to them too.
Many of them felt that the money they got at the end of a lengthy process was too little to be worth it. They may be right because although the savings credit mean figure is something like a loss of about £34 a week, the median is infinitely lower because it is skewed by a few very high numbers at the end. However, pensioners worried—this is partly the result of some of the problems with tax credits—that if they were wrongly paid they might face having to repay money that they subsequently could not afford. Nor are they clear about income and savings rules; some pensioners with £5,000 tucked away for funeral costs think that that disqualifies them. A few thought that as they could manage without pension credit, although they were entitled, it was morally wrong to claim it.
This research, which builds on two previous pieces of research that the DWP has done over the past 15 years on pension credit that I am aware of, suggested to me that means-tested benefits are almost inherently troubled by the failure of a substantial number of pensioners to claim, and that the new state pension is absolutely the right way to go for the future. It has to be on an automated basis. Whatever may happen to other means-tested benefits, we hope that at least pensioners’ basic income in the new state pension will be safely delivered and in full. However, means-testing will continue for the 25% of future pensioners who are not owner-occupiers but who are on housing benefit in the rented sector, or for those with incomplete NI records. The reduction in means-testing is mainly because the new pension incorporates the means-tested guaranteed credit while abolishing the means-tested savings credit. That is actually why the numbers fall.
However, if the new pension is to reduce means-testing, as we hope it will do—though at the moment the statistics do not suggest by as much as some of us had hoped—it must, to use the phrase, put clear blue water between it and the new pension. At the moment, the difference between what a pensioner would get under the three tiers of state pension, possibly some additional pension and pension credit under the new state pension, could be less than £1 a week, although the triple lock for the pension, unlike the earnings link for pension credit, should widen that gap over time if the triple lock remains. Age UK has provided figures showing that means-testing will have fallen by just 3% by 2014 from what it would have been as a result of this. However, as my amendment suggests, 2% would provide a rounder figure—a £3 gap, I guess.
I am hoping that the Minister will give us some guidance on the difference in income for each path that a person registering for the new pension will take, and the winners and losers as a result, so that we can work further on those stats before Report. The Select Committee recommended such a clear space, although it did not suggest a specific sum. The Government’s response was rather interesting. They agreed it was necessary to establish,
“a firm foundation for saving”,
but believed that it was not necessary to put that in the legislation. I do not think that is good enough. Put very crudely, there is not much point in having a massive and welcome reform of pensions structure if at the end of the day many future pensioners, mainly women, lose derived rights, and many other pensioners, mainly women, are no better off than they would have been on pension credit because the new state pension is financially not sufficiently distinctive. I beg to move.
Baroness Drake (Lab)
My Lords, I shall take advantage of the helpful peg of this amendment moved by my noble friend Lady Hollis. I completely accept that moving more rapidly to a flat-rate pension will bring losers and gainers. However, we need to have some confidence about the initial value of the single-tier pension and how its value will be maintained over time, in order to have confidence about the assessments of gainers and losers.
The figures and statistics that we have are based on the assumption of triple-lock uprating, which is far from assured over time. We know that the single-tier pension has to produce a series of outcomes: it has to be above the guarantee credit to address the disincentive to save; it has to be set at a level which reduces reliance on means-tested benefits; and it has to provide a firm foundation for private saving. However, whether it achieves those intentions depends in part on the starting value of the single tier and how its value moves over time. The White Paper therefore suggested that a single-tier pension should be worth £144 in 2012-13 earnings terms, but the extent to which the single-tier pension figure is to be set above the pension guarantee credit is very unclear.
At the time of the White Paper’s publication in January 2013, the illustrative £144 was only £1.30 higher than the guarantee credit—less than 1%—which was lower than the figure in the Green Paper, when the £140 illustrative figure was £7.40 above the guarantee credit, which is nearly 6% higher. In 2013-14 earnings terms, £144 would be worth £146.30—just 90p above the guaranteed credit of £145.40. We therefore have a lack of confidence about what the level of the single-tier pension will be at its introduction, what its uprating is likely to be over time and what its relationship with the guarantee credit is likely to be.
The rate of the new state pension will be set in regulations, and it is important to have some confidence about government thinking. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee commented that,
“we draw to the attention of the House that, for the first time, the rate of the state pension will be specified only in subordinate regulation”.
The Government’s impact assessment assumes uprating by the triple lock, but the assumptions about gainers and losers and pension adequacy could be significantly different if the triple lock were not applied. I also note that, when it comes to assessing gainers and losers, the notional figures include the previously contracted-out individuals. In one of the very helpful briefing sessions that we have been afforded, I asked whether we could see the notional figures for gainers and losers, excluding those contracted out at April 2016, in the hope that we could get a clearer picture of winners and losers. I was particularly interested in understanding more clearly who the winners and losers were from the base of the actual amounts that contracted-in individuals receive. I was interested to read a report this weekend, albeit in the Corporate Adviser. I quote from the article:
“The figures for mean gross state pensions, which give the clearest official picture of the level of combined basic and secondary pension of contracted in workers, have been omitted from the ONS’s 2013 Pension Trends paper”.
I understand that the reason for that is information provided by the DWP. For the sake of debate and for clarity, net state pension figures are only those payments paid directly by the state, whereas gross state pension figures are estimates of the total entitlement to additional state pension, which include those elements paid by private pension schemes that are contracted out.
Lord Freud
I shall start with the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, referring to the previous amendment regarding men coming off guarantee credit. I commit to write to her with the data on the numbers coming off.
The central principle that these reforms represent is that the full amount of the single-tier pension will be above the basic level of the means-tested support for a single person. This provides a clear foundation for both private saving and automatic enrolment, and it builds on the broad cross-party consensus that has characterised the debate that there has been on pension reform: people need to save more, and to do that they need to know what they are going to get. The reforms are therefore not so much about spending more or less money on future pensioners but about restructuring the system to provide clarity and confidence to help people today to plan for their retirement.
In the White Paper, published in January 2013, we used an illustrative start rate of £144, which was above the minimum guarantee and forecast to stay within the projected spending on the current system. Every extra pound added to the start rate increases annual costs by £500 million in the 2030s. A start rate of 2% above the standard minimum guarantee would incur significant additional costs.
On the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, on the narrowing of the gap between the standard minimum guarantee and the start rate of the single tier, the Green Paper said explicitly that the precise value of that start rate would need to be set at a level that met the affordability principle. The start rate that we will fix will need to be set closer to implementation, when the Government will be able to factor in both the 2016-17 level of the standard minimum guarantee and the latest economic and forecasting data.
The Committee will note that the regulations to set the start rate will be subject to affirmative resolution and will therefore be debated in this House. The noble Baronesses, Lady Drake and Lady Sherlock, asked why this is being done by affirmative resolution as opposed to in the Bill, as is the existing position. The different approach was flagged up by the DPRRC, although, interestingly, it did not recommend that we changed our legislative approach. That approach is consistent with recent legislation, such as establishing both the ESA and universal credit, and it is driven by not currently knowing what rate to use, given the enormous costs involved of getting that rate out even by a small amount from what it should be, relative to the means-tested level.
On contracting out, there is not a clear distinction between the people who are contracted in and contracted out. We estimate that even by the 2030s about 80% of people will have been contracted out at some point. The analysis we have done in the IA, as the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, pointed out, is based on the net state pension outcome, not the gross.
The stated intention of the Government is that the start rate should be above the standard minimum guarantee, and it is the Government’s intention that it should remain above the standard minimum guarantee into the future. That is why the Bill sets out that the single-tier pension will be uprated by at least earnings growth. There is flexibility in the legislation for discretionary above-earnings uprating, depending on the fiscal circumstances at the time.
I point out to noble Lords that where a couple both receive the full amount of single-tier pension, as a household they will receive almost a third more under the new system than the couples’ rate of the standard minimum guarantee. To promise a single-tier start rate at 2% above the basic level of means-tested support would mean that we could not guarantee that the reforms would be cost-neutral. With these reforms, we aim not to increase the amount spent on pensions but to provide clarity to support private saving.
On the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, on the decrease in the numbers of those who are means-tested being driven by the end of savings credit, clearly the answer is yes, in part. However, that money is being used to provide the flatter state pension that is central to these reforms and it allows us to provide the single tier in a cost-neutral package, while simplifying the system. Although there is no Baroness Castle to barrack us from in front or behind, or wherever she did it, it clearly makes sense to go to a system that is less—or as little—reliant on means-testing as possible. This is the way to do that and I urge the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Drake
Was I correct in understanding that the noble Lord confirmed that the figures that we have show that notional gainers and losers are based on the net state pension figures, not the gross, and that a certain category of payment was therefore excluded in that analysis? Those net figures will not include total additional payment entitlements.
Lord Freud
The noble Baroness is correct that the analysis is done on a net basis. I am dubious about whether a gross basis is even possible, so I will not promise to have an additional analysis done on a gross basis.
Baroness Drake
That prompts the obvious question: why not? However, will the Minister write to us on why the net rather than the gross figures are used, and why the gross figures cannot be used, so that we can fully understand the implications of the gainers and losers analysis with which we have been provided? Certainly I had not realised that there was that distinction. I was scrabbling at or delving into trying to understand this issue when I asked some of my questions at the briefing. However, I think the distinction between net and gross is quite significant, and it would be helpful to have an understanding of those two issues.
Lord Freud
I will certainly be pleased to write on the thinking behind why it is net. As I say, I am not in a position to commit to anything on the gross figures at this stage, but I will set out the latest position in that area in that letter.
Pensions Bill
Baroness Drake Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Drake (Lab)
My Lords, I refer to my interests in the register and mention that I am a trustee of both the Santander and Telefónica/O2 pension schemes. These state reforms accelerate the direction of travel set, with political consensus, under the Labour Government. The single tier is intended to be fairer, reduce reliance on means-tested benefits, provide a firm foundation for private savings and assist ordinary people to achieve a reasonable income in retirement. To achieve those intentions, it depends in part on the starting value of that single-tier pension and the uprating of its value over time.
The Government’s impact assessment assumes uprating will be by the triple lock but assumptions about pensions’ adequacy could be significantly different if it is not. I also note that the extent to which the single-tier pension is set above the guarantee credit is lower in the White Paper than in the Green Paper. I hope that we can explore these matters further in Committee because it is very important to understand where the consensus is settling on the value and uprating of the single tier.
The state pension age needs to rise in the face of increasing life expectancy. Five-yearly reviews by government will be informed by reports from the Government Actuary but it is less clear how much importance will be given to the report of the independent panel which will consider other relevant factors specified by the Secretary of State. Hopefully, these will include geographical, occupational and socioeconomic differences in morbidity and mortality. There is a need for greater clarity about the process and for clear public evidence to inform the debate.
The Bill also provides for the statutory override to allow private employers with contracted-out schemes to adjust members’ future pension accruals or contributions to recoup the employer’s loss of national insurance contribution rebates consequent on the abolition of contracting out. However, employers should not be able to make disproportionate adjustments. Will the actuarial advice of the trustee take precedence over that of the employer? What if adjustments disproportionately impact on one group of members compared to the other? What are the protections to be?
Many of the provisions on private pensions are to be welcomed: the abolition of incentives to induce a member to transfer their rights out of a salary-related scheme; the abolition of short-service refunds; the protection to workers’ pension contributions from the national insurance fund in the event of employer insolvency; and the granting of powers to the Secretary of State to impose requirements on work-based pension schemes on administration, governance and charges.
However, the question is whether the Government will be sufficiently bold in exercising these powers. Auto-enrolment utilises inertia, not active engagement, to get people saving. The employer chooses the pension product while employee choice is largely restricted to joining or not joining the employer’s scheme. The state harnessing inertia—together with the OFT finding that the demand side, the buyer, of the DC workplace pensions market is one of the weakest that it has analysed in years—raises the bar inexorably on governance requirements, especially as auto-enrolment drives a level of demand that the industry would not achieve under a voluntary system. Poor governance, a lack of transparency or scrutiny and conflicts of interest are to be found abundantly on the supply side. To quote the OFT,
“we have concluded that … competition cannot be relied upon to ensure value for money for savers in the DC workplace pensions market”.
Ordinary people are embracing auto-enrolment. Relatively few have opted out so far, and employers are fulfilling their duty. However, this places a reciprocal responsibility on the Government to protect ordinary people against poor standards and conflicts of interest. The challenge that the Minister is grappling with is apparent from the plethora of consultations and investigations: the FCA on annuity markets and asset management charges; the OFT on the workplace pensions market; the DWP on quality standards, governance and charges; the Law Commission on how the law of fiduciary duties applies to investment intermediaries, using pensions as an exemplar; and TPR on codes of practice. The imbalance between the buyer and the supplier sides of the pensions market, and the systemic inequalities of knowledge and understanding between saver and provider, mean that seeking an alignment of interests is not sufficient—the interests of the saver must come first. There must be a duty to act in the saver’s best interests and, where there is a conflict of interest, priority must go to the saver. No shareholder has a right to gain a dividend from selling or managing a pension product that fails to meet the interests of the saver. The product proposition cannot be designed with sub-optimal features simply to facilitate a profit.
I was therefore anxious to read that in investigating the workplace pensions market, the OFT had reached agreement with the industry to introduce independent governance committees to address the governance challenge, but before a wider community had had the chance to comment on that solution. As the Law Commission says:
“There are many difficult questions about how these committees will work”.
They,
“will not have the power to change investment strategies or investment managers … Furthermore, it is not clear whether … the committees will be under explicit legal duties to act in the interests of”,
the savers. Achieving low charges and good quality in pensions must be inseparable. Sound governance will ensure their delivery. Complexity and lack of transparency put employers and savers at a disadvantage. The OFT identified no fewer than 18 different charges. Full transparency is essential to those who are to be the guardians of the consumer’s interest.
The Secretary of State’s new powers must also be applied retrospectively to cover legacy pension savings. MoneyMarketing, in reporting that the Association of British Insurers has missed the deadline for the pension charge cap consultation, suggested that it was because providers cannot agree on whether existing pension arrangements should be included and quotes Adrian Boulding, Legal and General’s pension strategy director, saying:
“This is all about legacy and the L&G view that existing pension schemes should be able to enjoy the 0.5 per cent charge level that is widely available for new pension schemes. We are morally uncomfortable with the concept that an employer buying new in the market gets one price but an employer that has already bought and is a loyal customer is getting a worse deal for their staff … a charge cap … should apply to new schemes and existing schemes”.
Even if Legal and General has its own competitive considerations for saying those words, they still capture the issue well. We will have to see in the ABI’s crafted response where the common denominator comes to rest.
The Bill addresses the real problem of small, dormant pension pots by giving the Secretary of State power to provide for the automatic transfer of a worker’s pension savings to their new employer’s scheme up to a pot value of £10,000. “Pot follows member” cannot be implemented without raising quality standards or the Government risk transferring the savings of millions of ordinary people into myriad schemes over which they currently have little quality control. Generally, transfers take weeks, if not months. Lots of paperwork, bureaucracy, poor data and lack of standardisation combine to slow the process and increase costs.
All pension savers should easily be able to transfer and consolidate their pension savings, but some savers will never make an active decision, so an effective private pension system requires a series of efficient default arrangements over the life cycle of the saver. I have real concerns about pot follows member as the automatic default arrangement for small pots rather than the alternative of a scheme that can aggregate people’s savings.
I fear pot follows member does not accommodate people who leave the labour force or become self-employed as they have no employer to transfer to, but their ex-employer may nevertheless default them into a poorer personal pension because they do not want to provide for ex-employees in their existing scheme. PFM increases the regulatory burden to oversee the myriad workplace schemes into which automatic transfers would be made rather than focusing on leveraging extremely high quality in a few aggregator schemes. Pot follows member may prove complex for the industry to implement and increase risks to savers. Pot follows member increases risks of charges and transaction costs being incurred on the whole pension pot each time a worker changes their job and transfers rather than on the incremental amount of savings accrued with the previous employer. An efficient pot consolidation mechanism is needed, but I fear that PFM may not best meet this need.
Furthermore, many pots above £10,000 will be defaulted into a personal pension on which there is little quality control because employers increasingly will not let ex-employees stay in their workplaces scheme. The Government argue that significant sums accumulating in aggregator schemes will potentially disrupt the market, but in a dysfunctional market where competition cannot be relied upon to deliver value for money—the words of the OFT, not mine—the driver, as my noble friend said, should be the interests of the saver.
Occupational and Personal Pension Schemes (Automatic Enrolment) (Amendment) Regulations 2013
Baroness Drake Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I had just finished explaining why we were bringing forward the regulations and had started to explain the review that the department undertook between November last year and May this year.
The review found that consultancy charges were likely to be used to pay for employer compliance with the automatic enrolment obligation. This has been likened to expecting workers to pay for the steps that their employer takes to ensure compliance with health and safety law.
Over the course of the review, a broad consensus emerged that there was a significant risk of consumer detriment with consultancy charges; that is, individuals paying for a service from which they receive no individual benefit. With this risk came a wider risk to the reputation of pensions more generally at a critical stage in the rollout of automatic enrolment.
The review also found that consultancy charges can have a disproportionately negative impact on people who move jobs regularly, because they might repeatedly have to pay higher “initial” scheme set-up charges. In April, the Work and Pensions Select Committee raised concerns about consultancy charges and the ultimate impact on individuals’ income in retirement. The committee recommended that the Government ban consultancy charges in automatic enrolment schemes without delay.
A number of options were considered during the review, including restricting the use of consultancy charges through setting a cap, imposing decency limits and providing statutory guidelines. Our conclusion was that none of these options would protect consumers sufficiently or quickly enough. Even a low consultancy charge will have a detrimental effect on a member if they do not receive any tangible benefit from the advice that they are paying for. Our approach is the simplest rule to understand and enforce, and sends a clear message that we are protecting consumers.
While employers are free to get advice if they want it, the Government do not believe that the cost of seeking such advice should be passed on to the members of the pension scheme. Let us not forget that the Government have established NEST, a low-cost and simple scheme designed for automatic enrolment compliance, and joining that scheme requires no consultancy advice.
Banning consultancy charges in automatic enrolment schemes, which is essentially the effect of the draft regulations, will increase competition in the advice market. Advisers will compete on a more transparent fee basis and deliver value for money for employers. I therefore commend the regulations to the Committee and beg to move.
Baroness Drake
My Lords, the decision to prohibit consultancy charging for any scheme used for auto-enrolment and charges which arise from an amount paid to a third party under an agreement between a third party and an employer is very welcome, and I am pleased that the Government have taken this decision. The decision recognises the vulnerability of pension savers where they have not chosen the pension product but are automatically enrolled in the employer’s choice of scheme and where who has responsibility for protecting the best interests of the saver in contract-based pension provision is at best uncertain.
It is also welcome that the Government have called for evidence on standards of governance and quality in defined-contribution pension schemes. I hope that this decision on consultancy charging is the first of many by the Government which put the interests of the pension saver centre stage.
It is also important to reflect that consultancy charging was initially allowed by the FCA—previously the FSA—and its subsequent abolition, because it is quite clearly not in the saver’s interest, is compelling confirmation of the need for the two pensions regulators, the Pensions Regulator and the FCA, to co-ordinate very clearly on what is the appropriate framework of protection for pension savers in an auto-enrolment world where one has a mix of both trustee and contract-based pension provision and where, increasingly, the future looks as though it is contract based.
It is important to reiterate a point to which the Minister referred: Parliament having secured broad popular support for automatic enrolment—which is certainly manifest in the preliminary evidence of people not opting out from being auto-enrolled into a pension scheme—cannot afford to fail those millions of people who are allowing themselves to be auto-enrolled by not having a framework of protection that ensures that the interests of the saver are centre stage in any regulatory framework. Public confidence on this issue, once lost, will not be easily regained. This is a framework for auto-enrolment. I suspect that we have one chance at securing a rebuild of private pension saving in this country and we cannot afford to get too much of it wrong. I therefore welcome regulations but encourage the Government to be even bolder in forthcoming challenges.
Queen’s Speech
Baroness Drake Excerpts(10 years, 12 months ago)
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Baroness Drake
My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, and to comment on the Government’s commitment to people who save for retirement and to create a single-tier pension. People save for their retirement through the compulsory national insurance system, through auto-enrolment into workplace pensions and through an active decision voluntarily to save more than is delivered by auto-enrolment. Achieving a sustainable and fair pension system that delivers desirable outcomes for people requires a holistic approach across both the state and the private pension system.
The Government’s single-tier pension reforms are evolutionary, in that they continue at a faster rate than reforms commenced by the previous Labour Government in 2010. They will certainly deliver a higher state pension sooner for many women and carers and those on lower incomes. That is surely to be welcomed.
The state pension will always form a greater part of the retirement income of carers, who, as a consequence of their caring responsibilities, will spend longer periods out of the labour market or participate for fewer hours. It is regrettable, therefore, that the Government continue to exclude an ever-growing number of part-time working women from the benefits of auto-enrolment into a private pension.
Pensions are very long-term, and it is important that there is a consensus across the political spectrum about the long-term intention for pension policy. Otherwise, we will simply revert to the mistakes of the past, when successive Governments over decades took incremental decisions which contributed to an increasing dependency on means-tested benefits and to the huge decline in private pension savings, which can be seen from the early 1980s.
The single-tier pension will mean winners and losers, as changes normally do. It will be important when we consider the Bill fully to understand those trade-offs and whether, for the losers, the loss is fair and proportionate. The introduction of the single-tier pension is intended to strengthen the firm foundation for private pension savings and reduce reliance on means-tested benefits. Both are desirable, but a single-tier pension does not of itself achieve those intentions, as was acknowledged by the Government in their report, The Single Tier Pension: A Simple Foundation for Savings, which states that the starting level and uprating for the single-tier pension will have significant implications for what can be asserted about gainers and losers. The state pension must hold its value against earnings over the long term if ordinary people are to have a realistic prospect of achieving a reasonable replacement income in retirement.
Increasing the state pension age in the face of increasing life expectancy is part of a sustainable pension system. Reports from the Government Actuary on trends in life expectancy will inform the Government’s view of that age, but it is less clear how much importance will be given to the report of the independent panel reviewing additional factors such as socioeconomic differences in morbidity and mortality. Those are matters of considerable significance when setting public policy. As my noble friend Lady Hollis powerfully articulated, it would be most unfair to ignore them.
As to private pensions, there are some most welcome actions proposed by the Government, such as banning consultancy charges for auto-enrolment schemes, tackling charges generally and the abolition of short service refunds. With auto-enrolment, pension policy cannot rely on caveat emptor. Auto-enrolment is predicated on the behavioural insight that, for many people, improved information will not overcome the inertia that prevents their actively choosing to save for a pension. Furthermore, the pension chosen for auto-enrolment is a decision made by the employer, not the worker. A consequence of using inertia to raise pension saving levels—that is to say, not relying on people actively to choose to save—is that ordinary savers will have even less power and influence over the operation of that market. Therefore, it is welcome to see the Government indicating a greater willingness to set minimum standards.
There are many regulators in the private pension space—the FCA, the OFT, the TPR and the DWP—and the Government may not want to change the organisational architecture, but the need for enhanced co-operation between them is essential. The FSA’s proposals to allow employers to negotiate consultancy charges with their advisers and for those to be deducted from their employees’ pension costs were clearly not in savers’ interests and did not sit well with the messages coming from the pensions regulator. In workplace pensions offered by insurance companies, there remain significant governance challenges. No single regulator or government department has responsibility for ensuring that contract-based schemes provide value for money and a high standard of governance. Too much reliance on disclosure of information will not produce those. The majority of savers will struggle to process and act on the information provided, and the overwhelming majority will not make active decisions but end up in the default fund.
I hope that the Government will be brave and use their powers under the Pensions Acts 2008 and 2011 to set up more highly specified minimum quality requirements. I accept that it is reassuring that the Government have already announced their intention to consult on the OFT findings on the working of the pensions market, to be published later this year.
Finally, defined benefit pension provision in the private sector is, for the most part, in managed decline. The new duty on the pensions regulator to minimise any adverse impact on the sustainable growth of an employer raises concerns. The setting of prudent discount rates, for example, remains a key battleground—I make no apology for using that phrase—between trustees and employers. Trustees have to give proper consideration when setting deficit recovery plans. There is real tension between the very long-term funding requirements of a defined benefit pension scheme, the importance of the employer covenant being good for the funding of that scheme for decades to come, and the five-year horizon that many companies work to when making corporate decisions. The cases of Nortel and Lehman Brothers, going through the Supreme Court at the moment, are good case studies of such tension.
Automatic Enrolment (Earnings Trigger and Qualifying Earnings Band) Order 2012
Baroness Drake Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Drake
My Lords, starting positively, it is most welcome that auto-enrolment will really commence in October 2012, and this order is obviously an essential part of getting to that position. The pay reference periods in the draft order and the corresponding earnings values in respect of the relevant sections of the Pensions Act 2008 are sensible. We can understand why, for example, a daily pay reference period could deliver results that were not the policy intent.
It is also pleasing that the Government have held to the definition of qualifying earnings that reflects the common pay components that make up the pay packet. Aligning auto-enrolment triggers and thresholds with tax and national insurance thresholds in the interests of simplicity for employers wherever possible would seem a sensible approach—but only to the point where the pursuit of simplicity does not undermine desirable outcomes, particularly for women.
Aligning the upper limit of the qualifying band of earnings with the NI upper earnings limit provides simplicity, complements the policy intention and, by extending the range of earnings, increases savings a little. Similarly, setting the lower limit for the qualifying earnings band to the NI lower earnings limit provides simplicity and maintains contribution levels when auto-enrolment is triggered. That is the positive.
However, our concern is that the level of earnings that triggers the automatic enrolment of a worker is set for 2012-13 at £8,105, the PAYE threshold. This further rise in the trigger excludes yet more women, and places simplicity above enabling millions of women to increase their savings pot. We remain concerned for the reasons we have rehearsed previously: raising the earnings trigger has a disproportionate impact on women and the Government are repeating the errors of the past in designing a second-tier pension system that does not work for the life pattern of many women. In 10 years’ time, the error will be obvious, particularly to women themselves. I have no doubt that action will be taken to amend it, but by then thousands of women will have lost out unnecessarily.
The Government’s response to the automatic enrolment earnings threshold consultation reports that the main focus of consumer organisations was on equality issues, particularly the impact of higher thresholds on low-paid workers, the majority of whom are women, but clearly their views are not a dominant influence in setting the trigger. Millions of women have a life pattern in which periods of full-time work are interspersed with significant periods of part-time work when their caring responsibilities are at their greatest.
On the Government’s figures, of the workers eligible for auto-enrolment, two in five—39%—are women. Raising the trigger from £5,035 to £7,475—the 2011-12 PAYE threshold—excluded 600,000 individuals, 78% of them women, most of them part-time, but that decision was made. However, raising it to £8,105 excludes another 75,000 women, on the grounds of simplicity. If, over time, that earnings trigger rises even further in real terms, tracking proposed increases in the tax threshold, the number of women excluded from the benefits of auto-enrolment will grow even more.
The effect of excluding these women is, first, that they may not start to save when the reforms are introduced. Secondly, when they transition from full to part-time jobs they may face increased charges on their pension pot accumulated as a result of becoming an inactive member. Thirdly, ceasing to be auto-enrolled when they become part-time workers could break the persistency of the savings habit they built up when working full-time.
The Government sympathise with the view that only those who benefit from tax relief should be auto-enrolled. This ignores the working of the tax credit system. For example, household income brought to account when calculating universal credit disregards 50% of that income paid in pension contributions. Of course, before the reforms it was 100%. To quote from the Johnson report commissioned by the Government:
“Many or most very low earners are women, who live in households with others with higher earnings and/or receiving working tax credits. These may well be exactly the people who should be automatically enrolled”.
Those excluded women also suffer a loss in lifetime pay, albeit deferred pay, because they do not have access to the employer’s 3%—and for some employers the figure is higher. However, they will still lose out from any lower wage growth that flows from the cost of automatic enrolment.
If policy is predicated on the belief that most people will not begin to save unless the power of inertia is harnessed through auto-enrolment then it cannot be the case that the right of those below the earnings trigger to “opt in” will seriously mitigate the risk that many women will face lower incomes in retirement as a result of the level at which the trigger is put. As to persistent low earners, the argument that they should not save because they get state pension and benefit means yet again that there will be no “asset accumulation strategy” for low earners. If 100% of pension contributions were disregarded for universal credit calculation, this would reduce the risk of a fall in people’s welfare prior to retirement.
Furthermore, if the Government accelerate the move to a single flat-rate pension, depending how that is done, together with the more generous crediting arrangements for carers introduced by the Labour Government, then the incentive to save can increase for significant numbers. As the Johnson review again observes:
“earnings are highly dynamic and there are relatively few people who have low earnings throughout their lives”.
A make-weight argument for the higher earnings trigger is that it reduces the number of small pots of pension saving, which are disproportionately expensive for the insurance industry to administer. But of course that argument is totally contrary to the policy intention. The answer to that problem is the public service obligation of NEST not to increase the numbers of workers excluded from auto-enrolment.
Much is made by large employers—though having read the review, one sees that not many of them directly make submissions—of certainty and business planning from linking the earnings trigger to the PAYE threshold, so setting the direction of travel. In 2012-13 the Government are rolling out to the large employers and are raising the earnings trigger in order to simplify the process. However, these are large firms well versed in dealing with complexity. Surely we should not be trading fairness for women, which they need, for an alleged simplicity which these companies do not require.
Many large employers have already been given the simplifying benefit of an alternative certification test. Many use salary substitution, managing the complexity of employees opting both in and out of salary substitution. They are experienced in deploying often complex measures to manage their pay and tax liabilities and frequently changing tax rules. Do 75,000 more women need to lose the benefit of auto-enrolment to give them the alleged simplicity they seek?
To return to the positive: while we welcome the commencement of the new employer duty, and recognising some of the positives in this order, we remain concerned about the position of many women that is created by raising the earnings trigger.
Lord German
My Lords, I recognise in the consultation document and in the response from the Government that three-quarters of the respondents supported the trigger that is now being set by the Government in this legislation. Of course, this is not an exact science; one cannot say that a specific figure is the level at which people will benefit from coming in to automatic enrolment. However, we should recognise that for many low earners, investment in pensions is potentially unsuitable, and that it is not suitable for persistent low earners. I will come back to that point in a moment.
When the Pensions Commission did its initial work, it stated that low earners might aim for a gross replacement rate of 80% or more of their income when they retired. The Johnson review—which I, like the noble Baroness, will quote from—stated:
“This disproportionate impact on women is something we would wish to avoid if we believed that these people would benefit from saving”.
Individuals who are low earners throughout their lifetime will receive a relatively high income—I stress “relatively”—in retirement, without private pension saving. Paul Johnson quotes the example of an individual earning £10,000 a year from the age of 22, who would see a replacement rate of around 97% from the state alone. Therefore, the question is where the target trigger should be set. Surely the objective must be to maximise pensions saving where that saving is valuable and minimise it for people for whom it will not be worth while.
There is no doubt that this will have a disproportionate effect on women, but the question is whether potentially it would not be worth their while to invest in this manner. Would they benefit from the savings? The question that is being asked here is about what the threshold should be and whether it should be somewhere in the region of the figures that Paul Johnson quoted in his review for the Government. Individuals who are low earners throughout their lifetime will receive a relatively similar income without private pension saving. The question is: does the trigger enable people to come back in when their earnings level rises above the tax threshold? The question that the Minister might like to answer is: what will be the procedure for people who have been low earners, who are underneath the trigger, who have not chosen to opt in but who reach that figure to be automatically enrolled? If they are in the category of persons who will occasionally fall back below and then rise above the trigger level, how will their re-enrolment occur? Will there be encouragement, and will they be tracked so that the re-enrolment will occur seamlessly, without them losing out?
The other way in which people’s choices could be made is through opting in. I note that the consultation response from the Government states that people will be encouraged and that employers will be required to pass on information to their workforce. However, there is a difference between passing on information and encouraging people. The difficulty that many employers will have with low earners is in determining whether this is potentially good for them. It is a very difficult judgment to make, given that it may not be the right choice for a person who is a low earner throughout their life but might be for someone who is a low earner now but who has the potential to move back and forth across the trigger line.
Baroness Drake
I appreciate that the Government are looking at the whole issue of the transfer of small pots. The point that I sought to concentrate on was that it is very likely that the market will apply a differential charging structure to inactive members and to active contributing members. Even though the Government have taken powers to control that, those powers will not stop differential charging. If a woman is full-time, then takes on a part-time job with another employer and is not auto-enrolled—and so becomes an inactive member—one of the consequences is that the charges on her remaining pot start to rise, because inertia is not turned into a positive. It is that narrow point. I appreciate that the wider review of pension pot transfers is coming up.
Lord Freud
I will stand my ground a little bit on this, because these are some of the issues that really come into consideration when we look at the broader issue of pension pots. My colleague Steve Webb has said a few things about this in public, and I know that he is looking in private at this differential charging issue, so it is something that he is considering.
My noble friend Lord German asked a related question about the opt-in/opt-out rates. Those will be monitored on an ongoing basis. He also asked about people coming in and going out as their earnings change, perhaps going from full-time to part-time. These people will continue to make and receive contributions according to the rules of the scheme that they end up going into when they go in, but if earnings dip to the extent that no contributions are due in a particular period, they will restart immediately when their earnings are high enough, so there is no waiting period.
I will now return to two issues to deal with them precisely. I only touched on the differential charging that the noble Baroness was concerned about. We have powers under the 2008 Act to set a cap should charges become inappropriately high. We recently extended those powers to cover deferred members. Therefore, we have all the necessary powers, and my colleague is aware of the issue. We are monitoring the charges with rolling research and will continue to do that as enrolment is brought in.
I will close my answers by doing justice to the point about tax relief made by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie. We will continue to take that into account. The matter is not entirely straightforward, as we established. At this stage we do not know how many people will get relief at source as opposed to making net pay arrangements. We will keep that matter, too, under review.
This is our first review. It took a major consultation effort to decide on the trigger and the earnings band. We would have preferred to come out with this earlier, and I will try to do better on timing next year because early certainty is important, for employers in particular. It was right to consult this time, and to gather the views of people who will need to make automatic enrolment work in practice: those who will have to administer pension schemes, employers who will have to deal with all the questions from their workers, and people who represent those workers. The one message that we got from all of them was that we should keep this simple. I shall take that to heart for the future. Of course, it chimes with the Government’s Red Tape Challenge.
As I said, we will come back to this in a little less than a year. I know that I look forward to it as much as other noble Lords in the Room. I commend the order to the Committee.
Welfare Reform Bill
Baroness Drake Excerpts(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Drake
My Lords, I support Motion G1. I am conscious that I have entered the debate several times on the matter of the grace period before the weight of penalties comes into play and the benefit cap bites for those who lose their job through redundancy or some enforced reason. I apologise today if I sound a little repetitive, but it is something about which I feel most strongly. A modern welfare system, while addressing benefit dependency, must also support those hard-working families with a clear work ethic in managing today’s flexible labour market. It must not fail to support responsible hard-working people and their families managing today’s economic realities. There is a danger that this dimension has lost some focus in the current debate on the Bill.
The Bill writes the welfare rules for those in work and for those who have no record of benefit dependency. There are millions of people in this country on modest and low incomes who are hard-working, take the hard knocks that life hands out to them and fight to stay on course, so I welcomed the comments from the Minister, Chris Grayling, in the House of Commons on the 1st of this month that the Government would put in place a period of grace of nine months for those who have been in work for the previous 12 months and have lost their job through no fault of their own. The Government’s recognition of the case for a period of grace is most welcome, but I remain anxious.
We know that the Government want to see increased flexibility in the labour market, including, if I may speculate, revisions to employment laws on redundancy consultation and no-fault dismissal for SMEs for up to two years—we await their proposals on these matters. This desire, taken together with the realities of today’s labour market and the intensity of competition, makes a powerful case for inserting into the Bill the provision that regulations will provide for a period of grace in the circumstances where someone faces forced job loss. The provision of a period of grace for a fair period should be hardwired into the welfare system—an integral part of the definition of fairness—and not too easily reserved to the Secretary of State’s discretion, which is why I feel that the amendment is correct.
Ever one who is keen to build on progress to see if there is any more progress to be made, I would like to clarify a matter with the Minister. Experience since 2007 has revealed that some employers have been more creative in responding to downturns than by using the traditional laying off of workers and redundancies. We have seen reductions in working hours and we have seen unpaid sabbaticals—that is, extended periods of non-payment and no work, where, through agreement and to avoid compulsory redundancy and to assist the company, the employment contract has stayed in place but the flow of wages has been suspended or reduced. I hope that the Minister will agree that positive and innovative employment practices to ride out a recession are to be encouraged; they can be good for productivity, employment and the speed of competitive response. However, that raises a question: in such situations where hours fall to a very low level so that they are below the threshold and work conditionality kicks in, or where any payment of wages is suspended for a significant period, will the period of grace apply? In such a situation, the people affected may not strictly have lost their job, because the employment contract remains in place, but they have lost their wages through no fault of their own.
I repeat that hard-working families have paid their dues but will need support in managing their way through a difficult labour market. A period of grace is of itself fundamentally fair. After all, for hard-working people who have lost their job and are desperately seeking another one, which most of them do, what change of behaviour can the immediate application of the cap be designed to achieve? Rather, it would have the perverse effect of undermining their efforts to get back early into the labour market because they were rushing around trying to find affordable accommodation, move their children into new schools or whatever. While I welcome, in the statements from the Minister today and from Chris Grayling, that they have accepted the argument for a grace period, in my view that argument is so compelling that it should not be a matter of discretion but should be enshrined in the Bill. Could that period of grace be applied in a way that fits in with trends in the modern labour market?
I would like to make a final comment. I had not intended to do so but have been prompted to by the comments of the right reverend Prelate the Archbishop—sorry, the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds; I accidentally promoted him there—on kinship carers, a matter on which I myself have tabled several amendments. The Minister has given us his promise that he recognises the contribution of kinship carers, who keep 200,000-plus children out of care, and that he is on the case. I trust him on that; I trust him to honour his promise. I hope that he can reassure the right reverend Prelate that he will hold to his promise, even if today we cannot get the details of how he will do so.
Lord Empey
My Lords, I have some remarks on Motion G2. I recall vividly that in the Autumn Statement there were indications that regional pay was to be examined and the Chancellor had asked regional bodies throughout the United Kingdom to report to him by next July on the issues of regional pay. From a regional perspective, I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, that I have great reservations about his proposals. While a cap is by definition a blunt instrument, and there always has been a specific London issue in pay for as long as I can remember anyway, if we go down the route of establishing a body to run around the regions—as the noble Lord, Lord Newton, has pointed out with his usual typical incisiveness, the variation is not only between regions but within regions and within cities, streets and districts—then I fear that we open the Pandora’s box not only of regional pay but of regional benefit, and sooner or later some people are going to say regional taxes. I fear that the amendment could inadvertently have a perverse effect on all of us, particularly in the regions. I understand that there is very much a London issue, but within regions there are vast variations.
If you want to encourage people to move to where they are more likely to get work, that tends to be in densely populated areas—that is just the reality of life. This measure, however, portends a reality where you could discourage people from going somewhere that they are more likely to find work. I fear that if we go down the road of the amendment, we could open up a range of issues in the regions relating to pay, benefits, taxes and the whole relationship that exists there.
When I heard the noble Lord’s colleague announce this policy in the other place some time ago, I was greatly surprised. Many of his colleagues spoke to me after I had made the point about regional pay and said, “Yes, we can see this is coming”. However, this would actually accelerate the process, so I hope that the noble Lord might not move his amendment and might instead reconsider the policy as it might apply to the regions.