Public Service Pensions Bill

Debate between Baroness Noakes and Lord Hutton of Furness

Wednesday 19th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes]

My Lords, I can just about support the Bill, because it is in the right direction of travel. However, I do not think that the Government have got their policy on public sector pensions right. They most certainly cannot claim to have produced a lasting solution. I am profoundly disappointed by the policy that this Bill will implement.

I am not against pensions for public service employees. I fully support workplace-based pension provision, but I have great difficulty in supporting public sector pension arrangements that are disconnected from those in the majority of the economy—namely, the private sector.

Put simply, I do not believe that taxpayers should be asked to pay for public sector pensions on terms that are increasingly not available outside the public sector. There is no fairness in that. I have the greatest respect for the noble Lord, Lord Hutton of Furness, and his report, but I think that he was wrong to have landed his recommendations in a space that is not in touch with what is happening to pension provision generally. The noble Lord characterised alternatives to his recommendations as a race to the bottom, and that formulation has been used whenever his recommendations have been discussed. But that language grossly overstates the argument. The majority of private sector employees currently have no pension provision, although after auto-enrolment we hope that most of them will be in what is admittedly a minimalist version of a pension scheme, via the NEST arrangements. But no one, not even from the right-wing think tanks that I occasionally dip into, suggests that public sector employees should be levelled down to that. This is not an issue about racing to the bottom. The real issue is about the available issue of defined benefit pensions.

The facts are stark. In the last Office for National Statistics survey, 79% of public sector employees had access to DB pensions, while the figure is only 9% for the private sector. In 1995, there were more employees in open private sector DB schemes than in public sector ones, but the blow dealt by Gordon Brown's ACT raid added to other emerging factors, notably longevity, resulted in pension burdens that the corporate sector simply could not bear. Some companies have even been forced into bankruptcy because of the impact of their DB pension liabilities. In 1995, 4.9 million private sector employees were active members in open DB schemes; by 2011, this was just 0.9 million. This is the real background to public service pension reform. The reforms which are delivered in this Bill continue to give DB pensions to public service employees, and this is simply out of alignment with the rest of the economy.

There is, of course, a policy shift to a career average approach, rather than a final salary one, in line with the recommendation from the noble Lord, Lord Hutton. This will put downward pressure on the costs of providing pensions to public sector employees, but mainly for the minority who have significant salary progression through their career. However, the public sector will still unambiguously be entitled to defined benefit pensions, which is beyond the grasp of the vast majority of the UK's workforce.

There are some good things in this Bill. The alignment of the pension age with the state pension age, as recommended by the noble Lord, Lord Hutton, is long overdue and welcome. The inclusion of judicial pensions, so long virtually a no-go area in pensions reform, is also welcome. Control of the costs and risks of providing public sector pensions must be at the heart of these reforms, and I welcome the cost control clauses. The Government have accepted the recommendation of the noble Lord, Lord Hutton, of a fixed-cost ceiling. It remains to be seen how robust the arrangements will prove to be in practice, if faced with very high cost increases, but I agree that it is well worth the effort to see if an automatic cost-stabilising mechanism can be made to work.

The most important measures, which will help to reduce the cost of public sector pensions, will come from other sources. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, has already referred to these. By far the biggest financial impact will come from shifting pensions indexation from RPI to CPI. The fiscal sustainability report issued by the Office for Budget Responsibility this year shows that the vast majority of the forecast reduction in the costs of public sector pensions as a percentage of GDP comes from this source, from the shift to CPI, and calculates it as 0.4% of GDP benefit by about 2050.

The second most important contribution to reducing the cost burden on the public sector is additional member contributions. However this produces only about 0.1% of GDP and is a long way behind the contribution of CPI. All the rest of the changes facilitated by this Bill trail in behind that, accounting for around 0.1% of GDP. As I have mentioned, these cost reductions are not fully delivered until around 2050, according to the charts in the OBR’s report. Of course, massive modelling assumptions lie behind those figures. Without any sensitivity analysis, it is difficult to be certain about whether a long-term benefit will actually be delivered by the reforms in this Bill.

In the short term, however, there will be an increasing net cash cost of pensions, according both to the OBR’s figures and the Treasury’s public expenditure survey figures. An excellent paper for the Centre for Policy Studies by Mr Michael Johnson shows that the expected cash cost for public sector pensions over the three years to 2014-15 has risen by £10 billion in just the past year. This is cash that the Treasury has to raise from today’s taxpayers. This Bill should fight against the shorter-term real costs, as well as the longer-term implications of public service pensions.

[Lord Hutton of Furness]

I did not intend to interrupt the noble Baroness’s speech, which I was enjoying. However her last point is very important. If she is saying that the Government should reduce those additional costs that she just identified, the only way would be to interfere with the accrued rights of those pensioners. To do so would raise serious legal challenges. Does she advocate a policy of retrospectively amending accrued rights?

[Baroness Noakes]

Perhaps the noble Lord can wait. I will deal with part of the issue of accrued rights in a few moments. I said that the Bill should fight against this short-term cost as well as the longer-term cost because of the large and growing cash impact—which is a real impact that we can measure—set against the rather more esoteric longer-term modelled reduction expressed as a percentage of GDP. Given the assumptions embedded in there, those longer-term projections are not much more than conjecture.