Public Service Pensions

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for welcoming this deal. She rightly points out that it means that public sector workers have among the best pensions available in this country, including defined benefit schemes which are not now generally available to people entering private sector schemes. Therefore, I endorse entirely her comments in that respect.

The PCS has not agreed to put the final design of the Civil Service scheme to its executives. It is important to remember that the PCS represents fewer than 5 per cent of the members of the public service schemes and discussions will continue without it. We believe that the final deal—it is a final deal—is a good one and that the remaining unions will recommend it to their members. We are clear that what has been set out today is the Government’s final position.

My noble friend asked about the ability of members exiting a public sector employer to remain in the pension scheme under the “Fair Deal” provision. Implicit in her question was the notion that this may have wider implications. I certainly think that this opens up all sorts of possibilities, whether in relation to the mutualisation of services or the ability of people to come in and out of the public sector.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I echo the opening remark of the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, in referring to the constructive nature of the recent negotiations, albeit at the eleventh hour. I hope that the Minister will take care in saying who represents 5 per cent of what. One minute he is talking about the total public sector negotiation and the next minute he picks out a statistic which is to do with the Civil Service. We ought to be very careful not to pick and mix in that particular way.

I hope that the Minister will comment on a general point: namely, now that we have reached where we have got to, it would be very useful for all of us to discourage people from going in for rhetoric such as many Members of the Minister’s party, both in this House and in the Commons, have indulged in. Their slogan can be summarised as, “Private sector employment is productive; public sector employment is unproductive”. It is not just the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Daily Telegraph and the Murdoch newspapers that say that—it is members of his own party in this House and the other House. I do not mean that anyone in this House tonight has said that, but it has been said on other occasions. Such comments are quite ridiculous. People will think that nurses and teachers are unproductive, and that hedge fund managers and second-hand car dealers are productive. Is it not time that, in a modern social democracy or mixed capitalist economy—I do not mind what you call it—we agreed that that is a ludicrous way of dividing people up?

That leads to the point that we must get on with improving pension provision in the private sector. The Adair Turner report on auto-enrolment has been stymied to some extent. Is it not important that we do not have a race for the bottom as regards pensions? I am glad that we have drawn back from that to some extent.

Am I not right in thinking that CPI has been selected instead of RPI because CPI has been growing more slowly in recent years? Would the Government have preferred CPI to RPI if it had been growing faster? I have been around for long enough to know that that is exactly how the Treasury thinks. I ask the Minister whether he agrees with me that there is a position in the final set of correspondence which refers to CPI plus 1.5 per cent or 1.6 per cent, and that that is the rationale for some of the arithmetic, which—understandably, given the Government’s predicament—is based on getting more in for the Treasury, hence the 3 per cent take-away.

Finally, is this not also the time to say, given the huge growth in pension pots for the top 0.1 per cent of people—which is scandalous and is getting up the nose of everyone in the country, apart from that 0.1 per cent—that the idea that we are all in this together is a bad joke, unless that issue is also addressed?

[Baroness O'Cathain]

My Lords—

[Baroness O'Cathain]

I must apologise to my noble friend for jumping up. It is just that I was slightly goaded by the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall. I want to come back to him about the CPI versus RPI issue, because I have a pretty long memory, too. In the early stages of the Monetary Policy Committee and the Labour Government, there were endless discussions every month about the RPI. One of the reasons that the statisticians wanted to move to the CPI was so that they could get month-by-month comparisons with mainland Europe—the EU. That is exactly why it happened, and then it all started to go wrong. We should have a discussion off the Floor of the House and go to the Library to look at all that. It was fascinating stuff, and an enormous number of people wanted to go for the CPI, as opposed to the RPI.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I should be very glad to have such a discussion, but I have an even longer memory. For many years, I represented the TUC on the Retail Prices Index Advisory Committee, which was abolished by the Treasury when we made a recommendation that it did not like. The recommendation in about 1970 was that we should stick with the RPI for general purposes because—

[Lord De Mauley]

My Lords, we must move on.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I am quite entitled to come in for a second time within the 20 minutes. I have been asking a question. Is there not a case for looking at which index should be used, based on considerations other than which one is likely to increase more slowly than the other?

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, this was a negotiation between the unions and the employers. It was a choice regarding accrual rates and indexation, and the unions have expressed a preference for going for that measure of inflation, essentially as a way of funding better accrual rates. That was just the nature of the negotiations.