Pensions Bill [HL]

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 15th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, it is a particular pleasure for me to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, not least because she was so staunch an ally in relation to the City of London during the later stages of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. She has just made a much better speech than I shall. I am batting higher up the order than I should be.

I come to this subject as an innocent and shall describe my motivation in a moment, but first I should declare one interest not contained in the Register; namely, that my brother is a retired Lord Justice of Appeal, which will, at least in my view, preclude me from speaking on Part 4 of the Bill. I suppose, given the actuarial dimension of this subject, that I should declare an intellectual interest, which no one in the same condition so far has done, in belonging, like many in your Lordships' House, to that two-decade cohort uncovered by my right honourable friend David Willetts, MP and Minister, who were born between 1930 and 1950, and thus find that the austerity of their upbringing, with its beneficial effect on their health, adds at least four unexpected years to their lives beyond the normal expectations of the mortality tables.

I call myself an innocent, but a reckless ignoramus might be more appropriate. Briefly, in the dying days of the second 1974 Labour Administration—those halcyon days of the Rooker-Wise amendment—I joined a small band of volunteers under my now noble friend Lady Chalker—then a DHSS shadow spokesman in the Commons—to take an interest in these matters. A co-volunteer, in those days before the big society was christened with a name, was my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts. My only qualification to join was that a definition I had constructed for the benefit of my own small firm to illuminate the difference in purpose and detail between a 364—or was it a 384?—scheme and a 379 one in the then pensions legislation—the digits come back from long ago—so impressed our auditors at Arthur Andersen that they sought my copyright approval to use it throughout their practice’s literature. However, the fall of the Callaghan Government on 28 March 1979 marked the last parliamentary interest I took in this subject through different ministerial responsibilities thereafter.

Wiser men, especially those who have listened to my noble friends Lord Higgins and Lord Skelmersdale, the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, and the late, great Earl Russell—Conrad Russell—discussing these subjects in the past decade, would maintain their distance from these technicalities, whose language to an untrained eye seems sometimes as arcane as Sanskrit, though to no one’s discredit. But for better or worse I regard the reconstruction of a major social part of domestic government, which is being so nobly essayed by my noble friend Lord Freud in this and future related legislation, having as good a chance as any in the spectrum of the coalition’s programme of being the monument by which the coalition will be remembered. I do not imagine that I shall myself add many pebbles to that notable cairn, but if one is to be a bystander at the making of history, it is better, if possible, to be an informed one.

Before leaving the great sweep of history, let me say how apposite it is that this essay, in the French sense, is being conducted by a coalition in which the great Liberal Party tradition of Lloyd George and Beveridge is so vitally and vividly represented. Of the six members of my family who have sat in the House of Commons in each of the six generations since the Great Reform Bill, the first four sat in the Liberal interest, and only my late noble kinsman and myself sat as Conservatives. I do not think that my late noble kinsman, who was in the Clintonian phrase more of a policy wonk than I have ever been, or shall be, would dissent from the felicity of this coalition coincidence.

What is certain is that we are engaged in the early stages of a massively monumental project. Anyone who doubts it need only go back to the dinner Lloyd George gave on the evening the Third Reading of the 1909 Budget Bill concluded. He gave it for the colleagues who had assisted him at the Dispatch Box during the passage of the Bill. Mischievously, the menu card that evening listed the voting records of those present during the course of the Bill. We think that yesterday’s Third Reading was the culmination of a prolonged battle, but the scale of activity in the Division Lobbies during that Bill resembled largely that manoeuvre of my military youth—a tactical exercise without troops. In 1909, 554 Divisions were recorded on the menu card, with Lloyd George heading the role of honour at 462 personal appearances and Winston Churchill concluding it at around 200, with the engaging parenthesis “(twice in pyjamas)”. That index of all-night sittings may eventually overtake us on this Bill and its successor universal credits legislation.

One of the iron behavioural laws of your Lordships’ House is that if you put your name down to speak at the Second Reading of a Bill, anyone interested in briefing interested parties will immediately do so. The price you pay is that you then sit through the entire Second Reading debate, however long. I agree that in an emergency you could put your name down and then withdraw it, but you could do that decently only once. I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on, and thank him for, devising a Bill that is intellectually interesting without being incomprehensible to the layman, and which has had the effect of reducing the number of speakers by a third compared with those who will speak on postal services tomorrow. Of course, I am creating a rod for my own back, especially in understandable and reasonable correspondence from women approaching pensionable age, but in other respects the Second Reading duty works effectively, as I did not put my name down to speak until tea time yesterday. Yet Ros Altmann’s admirably clear briefing from Saga was put on my desk between 7 pm and 9.30 pm last night. I realise that it is nothing to the torrent that may follow, just as I also realise that my noble friend Lord Freud is, in these cash-hungry days, between a rock and a hard place. Resolving these dilemmas lies ahead of us.

I do congratulate my noble friend on the ingenious intelligence which has gone into devising the auto-enrolment procedures. I appreciate that it was always the case that the big battalions, the small platoons and their collective champions would react differently to the procedures and that a decently lengthy Committee stage to examine this Bill sympathetically stretches out ahead of us. However, I am pleased that the TUC regards the project at least as well as it would a curate’s egg, and, since the TUC approves the principle and resiles only from the detail, it may be an archdeacon’s egg anyway.

I support my noble friend’s praise for those who have prepared the Bill. I also congratulate my noble friend on the impact study, especially because it is noticeably not written in Sanskrit. My only whispered dissenting note on the Bill’s initial presentation today is best reflected in an episode from my past, when in the 1970s, before I entered the other place, I was responsible for helping Rolls-Royce, then a somewhat inbred company, to recruit the chairman of another FTSE 100 company to its board. After his first board meeting, he took the company secretary aside and said that there had been 55 acronyms in the board papers without an accompanying legend, and that he would not attend a second board meeting unless he was provided with a code. The company secretary was apologetic, and within 24 hours he generated a list of 89 corporate acronyms and their underlying rationale, saying that in a fair number of cases the acronyms had been new to him as well. The problem is nothing like so severe in the departmental briefing, but the explanations are not universally reliable, and it is easier to approach the Sanskrit passages if a Sanskrit dictionary is to hand.

I look forward to the remaining stages, which have the lure of a seminar. As a penance for not adding more solid pabulum for these proceedings, I conclude with the light relief I was offered by the Treasury when I had to travel the country as Paymaster-General, explaining to British business the obligations placed on it by the Single European Act. This took the form of an illustration of a non-tariff barrier in the context of a level playing field; namely, that in the life insurance industry a British actuary could tell you how many people were going to die, whereas a Sicilian actuary could give you their names and addresses. To be fair, I suppose that in our marvellous continent a Sicilian insurance broker might be similarly mystified by the character in Saki who had to have his 21st birthday three years running because it would have been indelicate for him to move on and up until his mother admitted to more than 35 years. However, all these minutiae are for tomorrow. The Bill is a necessity today.