Pensions Bill

Anne Begg Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Steve Webb]

My particular responsibility is automatic enrolment. We are about to put 10 million people into mainly defined-contribution pensions, the vast majority of whom, all things being equal, will then buy an annuity at the end. For understandable reasons, our focus in the past few years has been to get the infrastructure in place to get those 10 million people into pension saving and building up pension pots. Then, when they have a pension pot, we will ensure that they receive good value at the other end. There will be a set of people who will be auto-enrolled today and will retire tomorrow, but they are a minority. We need to get to grips with this issue. Annuity policy is led by our colleagues in the Treasury, which is why we are working closely with them. We hope to make further announcements soon.

Government amendment 31 relates to the Pension Protection Fund compensation cap. In Committee, we amended the Bill so that workers entering the PPF would have a more generous cap if they had been long-serving employees. The amendment applies the same provisions to people who are already in the PPF. We will not go back years and increase pensions retrospectively, but once the Bill and secondary legislation are passed we will increase their pensions going forward in line with the provisions we have already made for new employees going into the PPF.

[Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)]

Will the Minister explain what the position will be with regard to the cap for those who are in the financial assistance scheme and are not yet in the PPF?

[Steve Webb]

I am grateful to the Chair of the Select Committee. As she knows, the PPF scheme is funded by the PPF levy, and the financial assistance scheme is funded directly by the taxpayer. I think the FAS will be moving next year to the Department’s annually managed expenditure budget, so we will then have to find taxpayers’ money to make a parallel change to the FAS. We are continuing to reflect on whether we should do so. No final decision has been made, but I understand the case for some matching change.

To conclude, the change to the compensation cap will mean that relatively small numbers of people—who, having worked for their firm all their life, should have got a good pension, but on whom the cap was biting particularly harshly—will now get a fairer pension, which has been widely welcomed by those affected.

In summary, this section of the Bill deals with making automatic enrolment and private pensions work. Automatic enrolment has been a great success so far, but there have always been a lot more aspects to sort out, small pension pots being one in particular, scheme quality another. I am delighted to say, therefore, that this is the week we finally tackle the scourge of excessive pension charges, and I commend the Government amendments to the House.

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[Dame Anne Begg]

These amendments can all be categorised as trying to do something for those who have lost out as a result of the Bill. Many of the issues were picked up by the Select Committee on Work and Pensions during our pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill and it is a little disappointing that the Government have not always taken our advice on how they might be able to sort out the outstanding problems. One such problem, which has already been mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore), is that of inherited rights, usually those of women who expected to get their part of their state pension through their husbands’ contributions. Those who are nearing retirement would have no opportunity to meet the de minimis rule of 10 years if they were to start to make contributions now. Our suggestion was that there should continue to be some transitional arrangements for those within 15 years of state pension age.

Although it does not fall within this group of amendments, there is also the issue of those people who fell below the national insurance contribution threshold, particularly those who have had two jobs that together would have added up to take them above the threshold but have not. Perhaps the Minister could give us some hint of what might happen to that group, who are again predominantly women and will continue to lose out. Of course, there is also new clause 6, which makes a request on behalf of the group of women born between 6 April 1951 and 1953. They obviously feel hard done by.

There is also the group who have so-called frozen pensions, who have been so eloquently described this afternoon. We did not recommend that the Government should roll back the clock for those who have frozen pensions, but we should not import into a brand-new system the anomaly that those in Canada have their pensions frozen whereas those in the United States do not. That did not seem fair to us as a Committee, and we hoped the Government would act.

[Greg Mulholland]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way and for the contribution that her Committee continues to make. Let us face it, those of us who have been in this place for more than one Parliament have been hearing about frozen pensions for all that time—some of us for many years. Rather than our trying to solve it today through this Bill, is it not time that all the parties sat down together to discuss what commitment could be made for the next Parliament, regardless of who gets in, rather than the next Government being able to say “Well, the last Government didn’t do it, so we’re not going to either”?

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[Dame Anne Begg]

I think that may have been the problem with this Government and with the previous Government. Any Government who come in do not want to do it. The Select Committee’s straightforward recommendation was that the new system should not contain the same anomaly as the old system. I still stand by that. I hope the Government are listening and will change their mind and I suspect that the House of Lords will have quite a lot to say on this subject.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

Let me say first of all that I support amendment 1, which I was very glad to put my name to.

My new clause 13 delays introducing part 2 until the Secretary of State has reported an assessment of the differential effects and impacts of the pensionable age in England, Wales and Scotland. People are now living longer and the better-off live longer than the worse-off, who work more years and start working earlier. The latest evidence suggests that the gap is widening and that is certainly the case as regards the differences between England and Wales. Wales has the lowest gross value added of the UK nations and regions. Welsh workers in general are less able to save for their pensions, which means that many people in Wales are reliant on the state pension. Life expectancy in Wales is also lower than it is in England. In my constituency, life expectancy is 78.3 years for men whereas in Dorset it is 83 years. Wales also has the appalling legacy of large-scale de-industrialisation and subsequent long-term worklessness. That means that many people have broken employment records and a disproportionate number might not qualify for a pension because of their lack of contributions.

The Government have stated that they intend to review changes in life expectancy every five or six years, and I think Lord Turner suggested that they did so every seven years. I have proposed a new clause to encourage Ministers to ensure that the panel reviewing life expectancy looks further and also considers Britain’s human geography of low incomes, no incomes, long-term unemployment, sickness and disability. That broader inequality must be addressed, as it will certainly persist.