Pension Schemes Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Stoneham of Droxford and Lord Monks

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 21st November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to support the arguments that have just been expressed so well by my noble friend. In doing so, I declare an interest as a trustee and chairman of the members’ committee of NOW: Pensions, which has 1 million members and 20,000 employers signed up. The whole area of member engagement and communications is a major preoccupation for us in a period of what has been very rapid growth—not just of NOW: Pensions but of certain other master trusts.

To find the right way to communicate with 1 million people is an extremely tricky task, but we note with some interest that a range of solutions are now being developed. For example, we note that Legal & General, which I think has about 500,000 people in its trust-based schemes, does hold annual meetings, as the amendment calls for, while others who find that concept difficult are beginning to look more seriously at what they can do in that area.

Finding ways to encourage the member voice is pretty close to the top of most of our agendas. Putting communications at the heart of a master trust, which is by definition a rather sprawling outfit, is very important to try to get it to centre stage. The Government’s idea of a dashboard would help. I hope that is not being put on the back burner, because it would be a very useful tool to show people where they are with their pension investments and entitlements. Trustees themselves need to work very hard to explain basic messages about pensions to the people who have signed up. A pension pot, for example, is the members’ money now—it is theirs. If that penny really dropped, a lot of people would take rather more interest in the process rather than simply pushing it to one side as they often do.

Getting members to see how their workplace pension sits alongside the new state pension is also important. Members need a wider view than just the workplace scheme to get a picture of their total position when they are coming up to retirement. Where schemes offer a choice of contribution rates, as some do, drawing the availability of higher contribution tiers—and associated higher employer contributions— to members’ attention would help to make them aware that these higher contributions in fact mean a greater amount of money from the employer contribution. These kinds of points are in the spirit of helping people to maximise their interest and entitlement in the pensions area. Members should be encouraged to set themselves targets, take ownership of their pot and see if they are getting a good return when they try to work out their pension arrangements for the future.

I accept that these ideas will never be legal requirements—nor should they be; they are more good practice—but they are in the spirit in which every master trust worth its salt should be acting, and they put the members of the trust more at the core of its work. A master trust needs a very good communications strategy. I support all the things that my noble friend Lord McKenzie mentioned, such as online technology and forums. We at NOW: Pensions conduct regional meetings of employers at the moment and are thinking of extending it to members, probably on a first-come, first-served basis as we are not inclined to try to hire Wembley Stadium to run the meetings.

In supporting my noble friend, I urge the Government to take this communications area very seriously and put it not on the edge of their requirements but in the middle, right at the core of the work that is to come.

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the opportunity to support this group of amendments. I have put my name to Amendment 10 but, having heard the speeches so far, I can see no difficulty in supporting the rest of the amendments in the group—and if they come back on Report I would be pleased to sign up to them. The arguments have been strongly made but I will make three specific points about why member engagement is really important.

The first reason is that the risk in contributory pensions is totally with the employee. They are not like direct benefit schemes, where the employer is sharing a lot of the risk; in this type of pension, employees are holding the risk and therefore their engagement and involvement with how their money is being handled is pretty important. If you are introducing a regulatory scheme at this stage, it should be a central point.

My second point is that if you are introducing a regulatory system, you do not want sole reliance on the regulator to make sure that things are running well and that members are satisfied; you want a counterweighting source of evidence and interest from members themselves to support that regulatory role. That is why this should have the attention of the Government in the Bill.

The third reason is that, as we have already heard, organisations such as Legal & General are already doing that. If that is good practice, the Government should take the opportunity of the Bill to encourage it, take it forward and make it more widespread. The concept of an annual meeting, which Legal & General already accepts as a valuable new forum for communication with members, should be examined and included as an option in the legislation. That would be a way to introduce the discipline of finding out what members want and to make it the fiduciary duty of the trustees to understand what members want from their pension investment. For all those reasons, the Government must take this very seriously. I hope that they will look at this more closely so that when we get to Report, there will be no need to retable the amendments.

Trade Union Bill

Debate between Lord Stoneham of Droxford and Lord Monks

Thursday 25th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford]

I think it needs such sources of money at the moment.

Another issue that has not been raised is that a good employer wants representative unions. As someone who has been involved as a manager—I know that the unions may be suspicious of this—I liked to know who was in the union, because I wanted to know how representative the leadership of the union was in negotiations, how serious they were and how I should respond to them. That is an important point.

Another point that the Conservatives have overlooked is that, if you get unions down to a core so that they are unrepresentative, you will face very difficult decisions. I always remember Vic Feather saying, “I always look to the faces of the people at the back of a room, not the voices of the activists at the front”. If you want representative unions, you want the highest number of your employees to be members of that union. Not to upset my Labour friends, but if you go down this route, you will be handing the trade unions to the Corbynites, the less representative groups. You will have more trouble in the trade unions as a result, particularly in the public sector, than if you recognise that the rank and file—the people involved in high-turnover sectors, the cleaners—have good judgment when they have to face the decision whether to lose wages and take industrial action. Those people provide the solid support for trade unions, and you should be encouraging them. If you do not, you will end up with worse industrial relations.

I support Amendment 92. It is a good way forward, and the Government should look carefully at it. The amendments of the noble Lords, Lord Kerslake and Lord Balfe, help in the debate. We must address the fact that, once again, the Government speak devolution and then do absolutely the opposite—as in local government. The Bill, and these provisions, do not help us to modernise industrial relations.

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

Perhaps I can help the Minister to join the consensus on how awful the clause is by stressing one point that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, touched on. It is about choice. There is sometimes confusion in audiences that I address about check-off. People wonder, “Is it to do with the closed shop? Is it compulsory that union subs are deducted by the employer and sent to the union?”. The answer is no: the closed shop is history, it has gone. There is no compulsion, it is voluntary. There is also sometimes confusion with the political contribution, the political levy, where there is an opt-out. If there is any inertia selling, it tends to be on the side of the opt-out system.

This is a matter of choice. When my daughter got a job in the Minister’s former company, Tesco, as a Saturday girl, she got a form in the recruitment pack that said, “Do you want to be a member of the union? If so sign here. Do you agree to have your subscription deducted from the payroll? If so sign here”. That was the system. If it is good enough for Tesco, why can it not be good enough for Manchester City Council or all the other public bodies that will be covered by this provision? Why manufacture a series of disputes about union contributions and how they are collected in a vast range of British places of employment? It is a step far too far, and I hope that the Minister will listen carefully to what is said on all sides of the House.