Pension Schemes Bill [Lords]

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Monday 16th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms]

I rise to speak to new clause 1, together with amendments 2 to 5, and I am grateful to those from my party, the Conservative party and the SNP who have added their names to them.

New clause 1 addresses a serious flaw in the implementation of the pension freedoms that George Osborne announced in his Budget speech in 2014 and that were implemented the following year. This is what George Osborne said in that Budget speech on 19 March 2014:

“Let me be clear: no one will have to buy an annuity. We are going to introduce a new guarantee, enforced by law, that everyone who retires on these defined contribution schemes will be offered free, impartial, face-to-face advice on how to get the most from the choices they will now have.”—[Official Report, 19 March 2014; Vol. 577, c. 793.]

That was a recognition that there could be pitfalls in allowing people to do whatever they wanted with their pension savings—for many people, the largest sum of money they would ever have access to—and that the Government would have to ensure that everybody had access to guidance to help them make the best decisions.

The outcome of George Osborne’s promise is the Pension Wise service operated by Citizens Advice, and it is an excellent service. It is free and it is impartial, as George Osborne promised, and it gets very high satisfaction ratings from those who use it. The problem is that hardly anyone does use it, and new clause 1 is intended to fix that. The latest figures show that about one in 33 of those eligible for Pension Wise actually use it. Last month, the Department for Work and Pensions published a document entitled “Stronger Nudge to Pensions Guidance: Statement of Policy Intent”. That proposed the adoption of new nudges, which, according to the trials, would increase the take-up from one in 33 to one in nine. Well, that is not enough.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

On that point, I thank my right hon. Friend for the way he is championing consumer advice in this very difficult space. Does he agree with me that we do not want a stronger nudge, but a great big shove into the arms of impartial, free advice?

--- Later in debate ---

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in the debate, to follow the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), the Chair of the Select Committee and to speak to the amendments that he has tabled and I have signed. I will start where he did, with the issue of mandatory guidance—or as near mandatory as we could make it, as I raised on Second Reading.

The right hon. Gentleman quoted the key statistics, which show that the take-up of this excellent, high-quality service—it attracts brilliantly good feedback from those who use it, and the people who provide that service accept that it changes the mind of 70-something per cent. of those who actually use it—is feebly low. Trials showed that the figure was somewhere around 3%, before the nudge was implemented. That is not what this Parliament envisaged when, five or so years ago, we introduced the pension freedoms. The safeguard we put in place at that time was to create the Pension Wise service: free guidance so that people would have the chance to check what they were doing was the right thing for them in exercising choices they did not used to have. Those choices are incredibly complicated. In many cases, they are a once-and-for-all: once they have done something, they cannot reverse out of it.

That is why, as a Parliament, we were so keen for people to have that chance of a warning and to understand how this all works. They save up all their money for 40 or so years at work and get to the very end point. In many cases, they do not understand all the options. They do not know what they are being sold and they buy the wrong thing. The data in the FCA’s own retirement outcomes review from about three years ago shows that a high proportion of people are just defaulting into a drawdown scheme with their existing pension provider. They are not shopping around and looking at the other options.

[Ms Angela Eagle]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that at the moment the decumulation pension industry is unregulated, so there is no transparency on costs or on the kind of charges that may be applied to drawdown schemes? That is another area where people might be being scammed.

[Nigel Mills]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady. If only she was on the Select Committee, because that is an issue I have raised on a few occasions. Over the past decade or so, we have very effectively regulated the accumulation phase, but we have not yet got the decumulation phase in quite the same position, with charge caps. The default pathways are a great step forward that will help people, but there is a real danger even with that that people will end up on a default pathway with their default provider, rather than looking around to see whether there are any better options in the market.

We desperately need to find ways to get more people to access the free high-quality guidance. There is no reason for them not to do so. They do not have to pay a huge fee or wait a long time, and it is not a painful experience. It can be a relatively short phone call just to alert them to the situation and provide information. We need to get those numbers up. Last time we had a pensions Bill we had amendments calling for default guidance. We accepted a compromise that the FCA would do some work and find a way of increasing take-up so we would not need to legislate. The problem is that the FCA, I am afraid, took quite a long time to get round to starting the process. It did studies with some larger pension providers, showing that if they used the nudge with an extra reminder and gave them the information that Pension Wise exists, they could get take-up up to about 14%, or one in seven people.

I accept that we do not want or need 100% of people approaching retirement to take pension guidance. Some will be on such large pensions they will take advice that they pay for. In that situation, there is not much need for them to have simpler guidance. The irony is that the data shows a lot of people use pension guidance as a first step towards advice. They use guidance to work out what their options are and what they might need advice on, and then they go and get advice. That is a perfectly sensible use of guidance. I am not standing here saying let us have 100% of people, no matter if they have a tiny pension pot and there really is not much they can do with it, or if they have such huge ones they should be taking paid-for advice, but the right answer cannot be 14%. Even if we manage to roll out the nudge across every pension scheme in the country, we can only get to 14% of people. That cannot be the extent of our aspiration. That is why there have been various proposals on how we send people an appointment. If they do not take it, they can rearrange it, but until they have taken that appointment, or until they have signed to say that they understand they could have one but that they really, really do not want it, they cannot access their pension pot. I appreciate that some people will be rather angry when they pick up the phone to their pension scheme and are told they have to wait three weeks for a Pension Wise appointment before they can do that, but that, I think, is a price worth paying for them not to make a terrible mistake that they cannot reverse.

There is a real danger if people only get the nudge from their existing provider. We have all heard or taken part in those phone calls where we are told, “Now I’m going to have to switch the recorder on and read out some regulatory messages, but don’t worry, it’s all a bit of nonsense. It’s just one of those things we have to tell you. You don’t really need to listen. At the end just say yes.” Then they record the phone call and in that long spiel of “nonsense” there are the words, “and you have agreed to opt out of your Pension Wise appointment” and that is sufficient. That is the situation we are trying to avoid: people relying on one provider for their information.

I can accept that, as with all Back-Bench amendments, this proposal is not perfect. Is five years the right time? Are we going to end up spending far more than we need to? If, for some reason, the Minister will not accept this and has not come forward with alternative ways of doing this in law, I hope that he will at least accept that, even if we could roll out the nudge to all the providers that are as good as the ones the FCA used, a 14% aspiration is not sufficient. We could all work together, with the Select Committee and other key players, to work out what we think the right percentage take-up of Pension Wise would be, set that as a target for the FCA and if in two or three years it cannot get to that target, we can come back with legislation and put a default position in place. This would be a final warning to the FCA.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the Minister for that response. The Department for Work and Pensions estimates that 50 million pension pots will be lost or dormant by 2050, and people are vulnerable. We hope that the intervention he made may allay some of the fears people have. The ABI continued:

“Pensions Dashboards will not only help to find lost pensions and reduce the cost of financial advice, but should also prompt people to engage more closely with and save more into their pension, aiding consumers to make informed retirement decisions.”

That is really what we have to be doing—the thrust of this debate should be to try to focus that attention. The ABI went on:

“Pensions Dashboards are now woven into nine different Government and regulatory policy strategies, including the Government’s UK Digital Strategy, the FCA’s Retirement Outcomes Review and the Cabinet Office’s Dormant Assets Commission.”

The ABI also tells us that 60% of 25 to 34-year-olds would be most comfortable viewing their pensions through their mobile banking app—because that is the nature of the future—compared with only 11% of those aged 65-plus, which is probably my generation and thereabouts; 20% of those aged 65-plus would be comfortable receiving their pension data via post, compared with only 4% of 18 to 24-year-olds; and 61% of those aged 55 to 64 would find it most convenient to view their savings through the pension provider’s website, compared with 30% of 18 to 24-year-olds. What does that tell us? It tells us that people have different ways to access their pension, to look at what it means to them and to get the answers that they need.

More people in Northern Ireland feel that they have low financial capability—indeed, Northern Ireland has the lowest proportion of all the regions of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Fewer Northern Irish people describe themselves as “confident and savvy consumers”, with 43% saying so, versus the UK average of 52%—so we do fall behind—or as highly confident in managing their money, with 26% saying so, against the UK average of 37%. Fewer consider themselves to be highly knowledgeable in financial matters, with 10% saying so, against the UK average of 16%. We in Northern Ireland need the necessary advice so that we can decide, collectively, what our pension pots are worth.

The figures I have outlined suggest that pension savers in Northern Ireland may appreciate the benefit of a Pension Wise appointment even more than their counterparts elsewhere in the UK. Sadly, the DWP, FCA and Pension Wise data does not split user stats by location, so we do not know user stats for Northern Ireland; we know only the headline UK-wide stat that just 14% of pension pots were accessed after the Pension Wise service was used. The Northern Ireland proportion of current retirees whose main income is the state pension is the same as that for the UK as a whole; however, that proportion is predicted to fall back to 37% for those aged 45 and over and not retired.

I was reading through some of the briefings, and one of them said that the DWP had recently confirmed its intention to base new guidance and regulations on a “stronger nudge”. I am of a generation that can remember Monty Python and the story that went, “Elbow, elbow, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more,” but in this instance we need to say a whole lot more. We look to the Minister for more than just a nudge when it comes to the key points. We hope that Pension Wise guidance sessions will be available, and I think it will be good for people to take them on. In a survey of some 1,000 defined -contribution pension savers aged 45 to 54, nearly eight in 10, or 77%, said that they wanted impartial guidance to help them to understand their pension access options, yet a larger proportion, 81%, did not know that they were entitled to receive free, impartial guidance from Pension Wise. Fewer than half said that they understood enough about pensions to make decisions and just 4%, or one in 25, said that they would opt out of a pre-booked guidance session. I welcome the Minister’s response to the intervention; I feel that that might just make the difference for a great many people.

In relation to the workplace—[Interruption.] My voice is starting to go; it is going to crack up shortly. It is significant that greater numbers of people will have defined-contribution pension savings as a result of being auto-enrolled into workplace schemes. For these people, achieving financial security and wellbeing in retirement will depend on making well-informed decisions. This is a much greater challenge for those who do not get impartial guidance or regulated financial advice. I can well remember when my mother took me down, as 16-year-old—that was not yesterday, by the way—to open my first bank account, and she had me in a pension scheme at 18. That is many, many years ago—

[Ms Angela Eagle]

Surely not!

[Jim Shannon]

I am afraid it is. My mother was very wise—she still is: she is 89 years old now and is even wiser today than she was whenever I was 18. It is always good to have your mum to tell you what to do, even though you might be a lot older. But that is by the way.

It is clear that the way that we are doing these things is not as effective as it should be. New clause 1 is essential to underline the importance of people understanding their pension and taking control of it, with appropriate advice, rather than simply thinking, “This is for when I’m old.” Take it from me: that time comes quicker than one could possibly imagine.

I conclude with this: the issue is incredibly complex, and it needs a complex answer. I look to the Minister to outline how he believes that issue has been addressed in the Bill. I feel that we need both a robust dashboard and compulsory written statements, and I am not content that that has been provided for in the Bill. I respectfully ask the Minister for that advice and help. We have to get pensions right for everyone, whether they be 18 or 65. We will do it together.

[Shaun Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and all the other speakers in this thoughtful and well considered debate. It was also a pleasure to serve on the Public Bill Committee; it is great to see so many of its members in the Chamber today. I pay tribute to the Clerks and staff on that Committee as well as to right hon. and hon. Members across the House for their work, diligence and patience in taking part in that Committee.

I am going to focus my comments predominantly on new clause 1, which was introduced by the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms)—the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, on which I also serve. I pay tribute to the right hon. Gentleman for his fantastic work in chairing that Committee over the past six months. He has been an absolutely fantastic and very diligent, hard-working Chair.

To focus on the scams point for a minute, I should say that scams often come from the fact that people have not had advice, and those at not the bottom end but what would perhaps be classed as the normal end of the market are most exposed by not having access to advice. Given the comments in the Chamber so far, I think we can all agree with the principle that everyone needs access to advice. We need to ensure that people are informed as they make these life-changing decisions. From our casework and the evidence that the Select Committee has heard about people who have lost their savings—the money that they have accrued over years and years—we know the impact of not having the advice. We know the importance of ensuring that the advice is there.

I agree in principle with the underlying purpose of the new clause, but I question whether primary legislation is the right place for it. There could be a place for it within the secondary regulations that will be needed as part of the process to ensure that people have access to correct advice.

I absolutely agree with the comments about the Pension Wise service; we have heard how fantastic and well received that has been. People have genuinely been impacted by their exposure and access to the Pension Wise service. There is definitely a role for the service to play—there is no doubt about that at all. The fact that 72% of people who access the service change their decision shows clearly that advice has to be central to pension planning as we go forward.

The people most vulnerable to scams are those who most need the advice—they do not have humungous pension pots to fall back on or above-£30,000 pots they can transfer; these are ordinary working people who need the advice. I am thinking of the people in my constituency, in places such as Tipton, Wednesbury and Oldbury—people who have worked for 40 years at CLM Construction in Oldbury, for example. They have paid into a scheme and now want to draw from it; they are the ordinary working people who rely on the advice.

The Minister has given assurances that he will take a listening approach when considering the secondary regulations—I am sure that in summing up he will discuss what that means, not that I want to give him any more work to do in what will have to be an extensive summing up. I feel that it is there that the spirit of what the new clause is trying to achieve can really be brought to life. I agree with what many right hon. and hon. Members have said: there is a wider debate to have about how we ensure that those on the ordinary end of the scale, who do not have humungous pension pots but have worked hard for what they have got, get that advice.

The logistical challenges that my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara) outlined in his intervention—he is not in his place now, because of social distancing—can be challenged effectively. This is an interesting proposition, and I do commend the right hon. Member for East Ham for the work he has done, because I do think there is a place for it. However, we need to have such debates on secondary regulations to really get into the nuts and bolts of how this operates and how this works, so that we can get this right.

We also have to remember—this has been picked up as well—that there is an existing regime with how the FCA operates. It sends out guidance when someone is two months from their 50th birthday and so on. That is not to say it is perfect; we know it is not perfect. It is not advice as would want to see it; it is a fact sheet that people are then left to interpret as they wish. It is not where we want to get to. I think we agree with where we want to get to—the destination—but it is just the mechanics of how we do that. From that perspective, I agree with the principle of new clause 1, but I think there is a better place for how we do this. I absolutely commend the principle behind it—at its core, it is fundamentally about ensuring that people have access to the right advice to make informed decisions to ensure they protect the money and what they have built up through hard work—because it is absolutely essential.

I am very conscious of time, but if I may, I will turn very quickly to amendment 16 which is to clause 124. My hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Gareth Davies)—I absolutely commend him, by the way, for the work he has done on green finance and the green gilt work he has done—covered this so well that he has taken most of the points I wished to add. However, I will just re-emphasise one point he made about the unintentional consequences particularly of divestment.

Many of the organisations that perhaps would be impacted by this are actually the organisations that we need to lead on these new green challenges. As part of my research, I looked at some of the organisations that we might think of as ones that may need to be divested from. We looked at the oil companies like Shell, BP, Texaco and so on, and the work they have done—for example, that of Shell on biofuels, or BP on renewable energy in homes. I claim no interest—people can google it, see it and find it—but I think we risk a real unintentional consequence here of actually going backwards and almost shooting ourselves a bit, because by divesting from those schemes we inhibit the work that we need to solve this climate crisis.

In concluding my remarks, I think the principle of new clause 1 is absolutely right, but I think there is more to be done on the mechanics, and the place for this is in the debate on the secondary regulations and making sure that we absolutely drill down into this. I am reassured by my hon. Friend the Minister’s reassurances on how he is going to approach that. On amendment 16, I think there are some real unintended consequences that, if we are not careful, could actually take us backwards, not forwards.

[Ms Angela Eagle]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Shaun Bailey) in this reasonably consensual debate.

Madam Deputy Speaker, there is nothing like seeing men rushing into the Chamber in hazmat suits to ensure that we are as brief as we possibly can be, even though—and this is no criticism of the Chair—the grouping of these amendments means we have rather a lot of things to refer to in this gigantic group. One of the things I am going to do is to refer only in passing to new clause 1, because so much has already been said about it, and to concentrate a bit more of my remarks on the pensions dashboard and some of the amendments there, because that has not really received much attention in the comments we have had so far.

There are some themes that are really important to bear in mind in this whole group and in the Bill that we are discussing today. The first is strengthening consumer protections, which is what new clause 1 is about, and ensuring that when people are making a decision about probably some of the largest amount of funds they have laid aside for their entire lives in savings, and they are going to make decisions about what to do with that money that are irreparable, they do not get their heads turned by a slick advertising at one end and con artists at the other end, and that they get enough time, space and consideration to make the choice that is right for them.

Our pensions landscape is very complex, and it is getting more and more complex as it matures, changes and evolves. We are left trying to deal in legislation with DB schemes, DC schemes and CDC schemes, which we all welcome, but all these changes and innovations over time make the pensions landscape difficult for people to navigate. As we all know, consumer protections are quite weak, and the introduction of so-called pension freedoms in 2014 increased the chances for mis-selling and scams, so we have to be very careful. That is why I support new clause 1. I support any protections that will make it slightly more inconvenient for people to shift their money and that will reassure regulators, providers and customers of pensions that this decision is the right one for them, because, as we have heard, it is irreparable.

I do not agree with those who have said that we have enough protection against scams. The cost of losing a pension is huge and irreparable. The risks for scammers and con artists are quite low, but the minimum rewards are huge. Because our capacity to deal with fraud in this country has been eaten away, meaning that it is not nearly as good as it should be and needs to be improved massively, the chances of scammers being caught are quite low too. The potential for high rewards from conning people out of their life savings versus the risks taken means that we are a magnet for scammers.

What we have to do—and what the Bill begins to do—is try to close some of those loopholes. That is what amendments 2 to 5 are about. It is also about regulating superfunds, which is covered in new clause 6, and creating the new criminal offences that we all agreed with in Committee, to try to strengthen regulation, put up some real barriers and increase the risk that those who are trying to con people out of their pensions will be caught. I support amendments 2 to 5, as well as new clause 6, which is about regulating superfunds.

The introduction of the pensions dashboard is one of the things that will mark the Bill as an important piece of pensions legislation. I commend the Minister for all the work he has done to create the capacity for pensions dashboards to be introduced, so that information can be collected from disparate places and presented in a way that is meaningful to consumers. We are now trying to make the pensions dashboard more useful and important and to ensure that it is introduced in a way that does not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Amendments 11, 13, 14 and 15 are about how the dashboard should work. While I commend the Minister for the huge amount of work he has done, he has unfortunately overturned some of the amendments made in the other place on the dashboard. One of those amendments would have ensured that the first dashboard introduced was the publicly provided objective one, which would have a year to bed in before other commercially offered dashboards were introduced. The other place decided that that would be a good thing to do. The Minister and his Government have decided—he gave us explanations in Committee—that it would not be, and that he wants multifarious dashboards to crop up all over the place, some of which are commercially offered, and some of which I think would just confuse the situation.

[Guy Opperman]

rose—

[Ms Eagle]

The Minister is hopping about on his feet, so I will give way.

[Guy Opperman]

It is hard to hop from a sedentary position, but I will do my level best in future. I accept that the hon. Lady is a former Pensions Minister and speaks with great authority, but the Government feel that dashboards should be created in the circumstances where the customer is, rather than making the customer come to them. Even if one did not accept what the Government said, I specifically rely on the fact that the no. 1 consumer organisation in the country, Which?, specifically said that the Government’s view is the right one on this issue.

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Minister for that point. We had this discussion in Committee, and we are having it again on the Floor of the House. I think it is worth exploring, but within the context that I think dashboards are a good idea.

With new amendments, the Opposition are trying to get more information in the dashboard, which the Minister is trying to keep a bit simpler. The information that our amendments would introduce into dashboards includes fees, charges, costs and price—information that I would say is quite important to consumers who are thinking about where to put their money or whether to switch their money around. In what other area where services were being bought would we try to hide the price of the service that is being offered in quite this way? People argue that it will just confuse consumers to know how much money is being taken out of their funds in charges or fees. I would say that the opposite is true. The more transparency we have in the dashboard, the better.

I know that others will speak about investment philosophies and amendments 16 to 24, which are also in this group, so I will leave that to them. Overall, the Bill is a good thing. The introduction of CDCs is an extremely good thing. Despite the fact that we are having this boxing match about scams and strengthening the rules against them, increased consumer protections and increased transparency, I think that everyone on both sides of the House will note that the Pension Schemes Bill, when it becomes law, will take forward some of the work that needs to be done to try to ensure that all our constituents, whether they are of a younger generation or a slightly older one, can look forward to a framework that will guarantee them some reasonable income in retirement. I do not think that anyone on either side of the House would argue with that.

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle). I welcome her constructive approach and her general support for the Bill. I have no formal interest to declare, but I should tell the House that my father was a consulting actuary for much of his career and went on to run a friendly society, so I was brought up on probabilities and portfolios. I did not just learn my timetables; I also learned my mortality tables.

This was my first Public Bill Committee, so I took the opportunity just to listen. It was a highly informative and very good-natured Bill Committee. I thank the Minister for that; I thank the Clerks, and I thank all Opposition Members and the Scottish National party Front Bench for the constructive comments that they made in Committee. Given that one of my predecessors in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Mr John Golding, once spoke for over 11 hours in Committee, I think the Committee should perhaps be grateful that I did not speak, and I note that this debate has to finish by 9 pm as well.

[Ms Eagle]

I knew John Golding, and he never spoke for one second longer than he needed to for a particular political purpose. I know that he spoke for that length of time because he was conducting some parliamentary manoeuvres that were extremely important for the progressive cause.

[Aaron Bell]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. Yes, I think Mr Golding successfully pushed the Telecommunications Bill to the other side of the 1983 general election, but that election, as she may well remember, did not go well for her party.

This Bill makes pensions safer, better and greener. I will briefly turn to some amendments on each of those three topics. Amendments 2 to 5 are on scams. The right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) acknowledged that those are probing amendments. I will not repeat the story that I told on Second Reading of my constituents who suffered from a pension scam—all hon. Members will have similar stories—but those scams are extremely destructive. As my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West (Shaun Bailey) said, they often affect people who have no real experience of financial matters. At a vulnerable point in their lives, they can be taken advantage of, so I welcome the work that has been done, and I welcome the commitments that the Minister has made to work further in this area.

On the greener side of things, like my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West, I cannot add much to the excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Gareth Davies), who set out the reasons why the Government disagree with the amendment 16. It is an inappropriate use of the legislation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills), on whom I intervened, said, the Government have other ways to make sure that companies meet those targets. We cannot ask pension trustees to make those fine decisions. I firmly believe that the Bill is a real step forward, but engagement, not divestment, is the way to proceed.

I turn principally to dashboards which, for me, are the most exciting part of the Bill, enabling the same sort of transparency, flexibility and, crucially, easy tracking of our pensions as we have all come to expect of our current accounts, credit cards and mortgages. We are in the information age, and we need to make that information accessible to people, particularly with all the stuff that we have heard in Committee and on Second Reading about the number of jobs and pension schemes that people have. Auto enrolment, in particular, enables people to bring their pensions into one place and perhaps to consolidate them, which is a real step forward, as it empowers people. As my hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Rob Roberts), who cannot be here today, said in Committee, the key principle is informed choices. When we inform people about their choices, that can drive sensible decision making on, for example, consolidation.

The amendments that seem to circumscribe dashboards —for example, amendment 15, 8, 14 and others—are not necessary. More than that, they would be frustrated by the market. The Which? report that I quoted on Second Reading said:

“It is clear that even if the government was to decide that there should only be a single government-run dashboard, other private sector dashboards would continue to develop outside of the regulated market. These may rely on screen-scraping or other potentially unsecure forms of transmitting customer data.”

Alternative products are already springing up, and we cannot hold back the tide like Canute. We have to go where the customer is, as the Minister said when intervening on the hon. Member for Wallasey.

I do not think that we should try to buck the market in regulation. Instead, we should regulate effectively, and that is what the Bill does. I urge the House to reject the amendments, although I accept that they are well meaning. As many hon. Members have said, there is real agreement among us about how we should proceed, but I do not think that any of the amendments are necessary. I congratulate the Minister on the Bill, and I look forward to the safer, better and greener pensions that we all deserve.