Financial Services Bill

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Monday 26th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

Can I now intervene, as I intended to, before the noble Lord, Lord Flight, sits down?

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

It has nothing to do with sitting down.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

I thank my noble friend. I withdraw the sedentary remark. The noble Lord is experienced in these affairs, so can he assure the House that the situation will not arise where somebody with no financial sophistication whatever enters into arrangements with one of the agents about whom he is talking—for example, in respect of a pension—only to find 15 years later that there has been a gross failure of propriety?

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

Very often a person taking out a pension, in particular, is wholly dependent upon the advice of the financial adviser.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

I remind my noble friend that on Report one may speak only once to any amendment.

[Lord Flight]

My Lords, the biggest contributors to messing up pensions over the past 15 years or so—making them so complicated—have been Governments. I was looking into my own pension arrangements and found that I could not understand them.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

I think that the rule applies also to the mover of the amendment.

[Lord Peston]

I am sorry; I am a bit lost on the procedure here. I was under the impression that if someone was moving an amendment he could be asked any number of questions and reply to them. When did we invent a rule that said that we could not ask questions and ask the person moving the amendment to answer them? I am not convinced that we are not making a new rule here. By the way, that is not my speech, which I am about to make.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, on Report the mover may reply to any questions at the end but does not reply individually in the course of the debate.

[Lord Peston]

I hate to prolong this but I am not certain that that is right. How are we to conduct the clarification of the amendment if we do not get an answer to an early question in order to ask a later one? I am totally lost as to how we are handling this. We should not forget that this is an immensely complicated Bill and many of us have had great difficulties dealing with it. I have a question for the noble Lord, Lord Flight, just to clarify matters and it may be that someone else will build on that, but we are being told that we cannot do that. That does not seem to be a very helpful way of dealing with this Bill.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

I am sorry to intervene again on the noble Lord, Lord Peston, who has many more years of experience of this House than I do, but this is not the form that Report stage takes. The mover may reply to questions at the end of the debate, but the debate does not go backwards and forwards in the way that it does at other stages of the Bill.