Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Jim Shannon and David Mowat

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[David Mowat]

I support that, and I just reiterate the words the Chancellor used: those who have the worst values in our society are being used to fund those who have the best values in our society. That just about sums it up.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

rose—

[David Mowat]

I have given way twice already, so I am sorry but I am not going to do so now.

I wish to say a little about the carbon price floor, because I was delighted that the Chancellor has acted on it. The action makes no difference to our commitments on the overall carbon reduction profile that this country has made, but it makes a great difference to the potential carbon leakage we are facing in our great energy-intensive industries, particularly in the north-west and north-east. Some 900,000 people work in energy-intensive industries in our country, and I sometimes think they are forgotten in our dialogue about energy prices. It is worth understanding that what the Chancellor has done is remove the straitjacket on costs, which would have put a great deal of those jobs at risk. For example, we have already lost primary aluminium smelting in this country—it has moved out of the UK—and we are losing marginal chemicals capacity from this country. I am surprised that a number of Opposition Members are not more exercised about this issue in general, given that they represent parts of the north-east, where there is heavy chemical manufacturing, and there are a lot of energy-intensive industries and a lot of jobs, because we cannot rebalance our economy back towards manufacturing if we have differentially high energy prices in this country. We just will not be able to do that—it will not happen.

This issue is not just about what is happening in the United States on shale gas and shale prices; it is also about what is happening on mainland Europe. It is an inconvenient truth—to use a known phrase—in this whole issue of carbonisation that we produce not only considerably less carbon per head than the EU average, but less carbon per capita. We produce 30% less carbon per head and carbon per capita than Germany, yet Germany is pursuing a policy of building unabated coal power stations at scale. We are being left behind in all that, and what the Chancellor has done on the framework is absolutely spot on and will make a difference to those 900,000 jobs. I predict that we will be revisiting this issue at the next Budget and certainly into the next Parliament, because there is a great deal of unfinished business in this area.

Before I leave the field of energy, may I say in passing that the infrastructure plan is very welcome? Two big parts of the national infrastructure plan are Hinkley Point C and Wylfa—together they make up about a quarter of it. They are both vital to our country and our economy. Both are currently under EU state aid investigation, which is holding up the projects. I have heard Ministers saying that they are confident that they will have that agreed, and I very much hope that is the case, because it would be a great paradox if those low-carbon projects, which are essential to our energy security and to our decarbonisation efforts, are held up within the EU at the same time as our EU partners are building unabated coal power stations at scale in countries such as Holland, Germany and Belgium.

I want to move on now to tax avoidance and tax evasion. The Red Book shows incremental revenue of £2 billion over the next two years from the anti-abuse legislation that we introduced. I very much welcome the Chancellor reducing the level of corporate avoidance of stamp duty from £2 million to £500,000. The closure of that tax loophole has brought in hundreds of millions of pounds. It is an example, as I said at the start of my remarks, of why income equality is so much better now than it was under the previous Government.

I also welcome the up-front taxation of tax schemes, which means that if people get involved in controversial schemes, they will not be saving tax and cash flow as they wait to go to tribunal. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is also able to act more quickly than it has hitherto been able to do.

There were four tests today, and the Chancellor has passed them and any reasonable expectation of this Budget. I am happy to support it.

Pension Industry

Debate between Jim Shannon and David Mowat

Tuesday 21st February 2012 Commons Chamber

[David Mowat]

I agree. The key word that the hon. Gentleman used in that intervention was “transparency”. If the market is to work, there must be transparency and comparability, but it seems to me that there are people in the industry who do not want the market to work. The market might work better if independent advice were freely available, but in the past the industry has effectively controlled advisers by treating them as paid intermediaries with a commission structure that compromised their independence, and between 2002 and 2007 its payments to such intermediaries for their advice rose by 50%. Hopefully the RDR—the retail distribution review will deal with the problem, and I give the Government credit for that.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on raising this matter tonight. My hon. Friend the Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) mentioned people who have taken out small pensions and who also fall into a tax bracket. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that their position should also be reviewed by the Government?

[David Mowat]

I shall be making a number of suggestions to the Minister later, and I certainly agree with what the hon. Gentleman has said.

I also give the Government—in fact, the last Government —credit for setting up the National Employment Savings Trust, without which auto-enrolment would be entirely untenable. Given its low charges and what appears to be a sensible investment policy, the organisation has an important contribution to make. However, as I shall make clear later, I think that the Government could be more radical about what NEST can achieve.

Let me summarise the position by saying that the fund management part of the industry has evolved into a mess. The market has failed owing to asymmetry of information and lack of transparency, and we are about to impose auto-enrolment on top of that mess. The £35 billion of tax subsidy that is currently provided will increase, and will be supplemented by employer and employee contributions which will also run into the billions. Those cash flows ought to be finding their way into better pensions rather than into the Chelsea property market.

I ask the Minister to assure us that before any of this happens, he will take the following steps. First, there should be a template for charge structures that will facilitate transparency, comparability and reporting. An analogous debate is taking place in the Department of Energy and Climate Change about energy suppliers, who are being required to introduce tariffs that allow comparison. Exactly the same should happen in this industry: indeed, it is more important for it to happen in this industry than in energy.

Secondly, there should be a charges cap on any supplier who becomes involved in auto-enrolment. I was staggered to read in a written answer that the Minister did not consider that necessary. A 1% cap was applied to stakeholder pensions, and the same should apply in this case.

Thirdly, some of the restrictions on NEST should be removed. The philosophical basis of the contribution limit of £4,400 and the restrictions on transfers in and out was that the purpose of NEST was not to compete with the market, but to operate in the parts of the market in which organisations do not wish to operate. That is an inadequate approach, and I think that the Government should be more proactive. Finally, the Government must ensure that there is no further slippage in the introduction of the RDR. Unbiased investment advice is sorely needed, and needed soon.

I fear that unless those measures are adopted, auto-enrolment will compound a failure that could easily become our next mis-selling scandal.

Let me now say something about annuities. It is possible for people to take their pension pots and then purchase annuities that will support them for the rest of their lives. However, the background is already tough—quantitative easing and life expectancy have driven down annuity rates—and the solvency II requirements may make the position even worse. It is clearly critical that the public obtain the best value possible. This means shopping around, but that is exactly what the big players in the industry do not want to happen. They want to stop it because it is their belief that they “own” that customer relationship, and they want to turn that ownership into more profit using two techniques. The first is the attempt to make the transition from savings into annuity seamless. That means putting an application form in with the final pension statements along with their own quotes. This, combined with a relationship sometimes developed over decades, is often enough to trap retirees into unsuitable and inadequate products. The second technique is using the asymmetry of information that we have seen in other areas to ensure that the retiree would need a maths qualification and a lot of intellectual self-confidence to sort out a better deal.

I have mentioned complexity, and I found the following sorts of annuities on the web—enhanced, fixed, guaranteed, immediate needs, impaired, income, index-linked, joint life, lifetime, lump sum, protected rights, purchase life, single life, variable life, with profits and smokers. For the average punter to work out intelligently what is best for him and his family using that lot is very tough indeed. The fundamental business objective is simple, but that is not how the market has evolved. The consequence has been mis-selling on an epic scale. A recent report from the CASS business school mentioned an existing provider offering £3,600 for an annuity pot and then a subsequent provider offering £26,000. That may be an outlier, but the facts are that 90% of retirees buy pensions from their existing fund manager and a very high number of those get below what the open market would offer. This matters to the Government—or it should do—because those massive profits siphoned off by the industry are resulting in hardship and an increased reliance on state benefits.

What should we do? I have five suggestions for the Minister. First, the Government should consider setting up an equivalent of NEST, specialising in the low cost provision of annuities. The IT and business process challenges around annuity provision are easier, as the cash does not need to be collected. At a stroke, the Government could provide an organisation that was a hallmark for fairness and best practice. Lord Myners has suggested that the Government allow people to purchase Treasury bonds direct, which would fit in with my proposal.

Secondly, the Government should consider making it illegal for the organisation that administers the saving regime to also provide an annuity. The advantage of this is that it keeps the Government out altogether while helping to make the market work. At a stroke, we would get new entrants to the market who are likely to be smaller, hungrier and more efficient. There are many precedents for this in the private sector. I used to work in the IT industry and it was not uncommon for those who designed an application to be forbidden to bid for implementation, because the procurement people wanted to ensure that the relationship advantage that had developed did not affect the pricing for the final step.

Thirdly, if the Government continue the existing system, in which providers attempt this seamless transition, there should be a rule that an annuity provided should be signed off by an independent financial adviser. That is a simple step and would ensure that the lethal combination of asymmetry of information and “relationship abuse” do not combine to rip off the retiree.

The fourth measure is a similar regime for annuities as I have suggested for charges for investment funds. We should insist on a few, relatively simple categories, and that would force transparency and comparability, also forcing the market to work properly. I believe in the market, but in this industry it has not worked. The industry will say that standardisation will limit choice, but they would say that, wouldn’t they? This is a simple transaction that needs to be made easier.

Finally, the Government should implement a system in which retirees approaching the annuity purchase point are much better informed about their options. They should be able to go to the open market and it should be forbidden for application forms to be put in with the actual pension round-up statement. The National Association of Pension Funds has a number of sensible measures in this regard, but I am of the view that that fifth one, on its own, is not enough.

In summary, it is vital that our people in our country save more than they are saving at the moment, but we do not wish to continue saving if the tax relief on that is channelled off for the property market in Chelsea and does not go to the savers themselves. Ordinary families continue to be penalised by an industry that has made supranormal profits by creating and exploiting a market failure, and the Government need to address that. If the Minister allows auto-enrolment to go ahead without reform, we are setting the scene for the next mis-selling scandal. I understand that it is tough for him to resist the lobbyists, who will be all over him on this, but self-regulation is not enough and the time to act is now.