Pension Schemes Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 18th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, and to hear nature-positive sentiments from the Conservative Benches. We are hearing a wide range of perspectives in that space, and I am glad to hear those. I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and the National Association of Local Councils.

I echo the noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, in enjoying seeing so many familiar faces on the pensions trail. My first ever Committee was on the Pension Schemes Bill some six years ago. It is also nice to welcome new faces such as the noble Baroness, Lady White of Tufnell Park. I very much look forward to her speech as someone who, when in London, stays just across the border in Kentish Town. I also join the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, in his expressions of concern about any forced investment in private equity. It is an extractivist, exploitative model which benefits a few at the cost of the many and does not have the long-term perspective that we surely need when talking about pensions.

I will start by looking at the context. We are starting from when the Chancellor initiated a pensions review in August 2024, led by the DWP and HMT, aimed at bolstering investment in the UK and dealing with pension adequacy—or rather, the significant levels of pension inadequacy that so many now suffer from.

Picking up the point about pension age raised by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, although from an opposite perspective, I note that when the state pension age rose from 65 to 66, between December 2018 and October 2020, the percentage of 65 year-olds in income poverty more than doubled from 10% to 24%. A quarter of a million more 60 to 64 year-olds are now in poverty than in 2010, when the state pension age began rising. These figures are from a report by the Standard Life Centre for the Future of Retirement. According to the research, the poverty rate for 60 to 64 year-olds increased from 16% to 22% from 2009 to 2024. There are now 8 million people in their 60s in the UK, up from 6.7 million in 2010, and that is expected to peak at 8.7 million in 2031. Many of those are pre-pensioners now, but they are very soon going to be pensioners. Some are pensioners already, and we have a huge poverty problem there. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said that this has to be a fiscal consideration. I am afraid we have to look at it much more broadly and consider the state of public health in the UK, whether many of those people are indeed fit to work, and the huge inequality of health at age 60, 65 or 70 that operates across different communities and social groups.

We also have to acknowledge that 2.8 million pensioners are now living in households below the minimum income standard. I note that the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee said in July:

“No older person should be unable to have a minimum, dignified, socially acceptable standard of living”.


The Green Party concurs with that. I know the Minister will be interested that women make up 67% of those pensioners in poverty. There has been some improvement in the situation with the new state pension but, as the committee noted in July, there are “blind spots” in policy-making. The reality of women’s lives is still insufficiently recognised. I cannot see anything in this Bill that deals with that, but I would be interested if the Minister could contribute anything on it.

Staying with the context, because it is important that we think about where we are before we get to the detail, according to ONS data we now have 44% of adults aged 16 and over actively contributing to a pension pot. This compares to 34% a decade earlier. Obviously, auto-enrolment is a really important factor, but according to the recent Scottish Widows 2025 Retirement Report, 39% of working-age adults are not on track to achieve what the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association deems a minimum lifestyle in retirement, and that is a 1% increase since 2024, so we are headed in the wrong direction.

The Minister said this is all about security and dignity in retirement. Before we start talking about private pensions, we have to acknowledge that the financial sector’s private pensions are not going to meet everybody’s needs. There are great risks with the financial sector in this age of shocks, and we have to acknowledge that the state pension must be the anchor of security, certainty and freedom from fear for everybody in our society.

Picking up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, on our Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee report, there are a couple of extra facts from that report that I think are telling and concerning. At 149 pages, the Bill’s delegated powers memorandum is nearly as long as the Bill itself, which is 161 pages. The number of delegated powers in the Bill—119—nearly exceeds the number of clauses, which is 123.

I have spent quite a bit of time on context because I think it is important, but I turn now to a couple of points that I expect to raise in Committee and possibly later. One of those is the term “fiduciary duty”. Lots of people have been asking me, “What are you doing in the last week before Christmas?” and I have said, “I am going to be talking about fiduciary duty for pension schemes”. I have then got lots of blank looks.

But this is something I have actually long been familiar with as a Green, as we have been struggling over many years to ensure that local pension schemes in particular are able to avoid investing, say, in the merchants of death, big tobacco, because that is bad for pensioners in a broader context, or able to avoid investing in fossil fuels because of their health and environmental impacts, and also because of the financial risks of the carbon bubble. So things like “fiduciary duties” roll off my tongue so easily.

Noble Lords will know that this was debated very strongly in the Commons. They have started the work in some ways but have left us with an unfinished piece of work. In response to the amendment in the Commons supported by 34 MPs, including all four Green MPs, the Pensions Minister has now committed to legislate to bring forward statutory guidance—again—on fiduciary duty. However, as I understand it—I am happy to be corrected by the Minister—the statutory guidance provided by the Government would not apply to the whole range of pension schemes and would not provide the legal clarity that schemes would need to wish to act on these issues. Any statutory guidance of course need not be followed and is at risk from potential future Governments.

Although this sounds technical, it is of course terribly important. I note that Liam Byrne in the other place said that there is currently confusion—and what the Government are proposing does not seem to deal with that confusion. With confusion comes caution. Then, we see trustees understandably following the safe path, rather than the one they can actually see is the right path.

The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, has covered a lot of what I was going to say about nature, so I will not repeat that. But it is worth looking at this from my perspective of six years in this place. I am delighted to see the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, in her place, because she has been a leader in finally getting successive Governments to put climate and nature into Bills. To get the climate and nature bit in because the Government initially left it out has become almost the standard part of the role of your Lordships’ House. That is something I am sure we will return to.

I have one final point to make on the Bill. The Financial Conduct Authority has, to be charitable, a chequered regulatory history. The Minister said that the FCA would have this extra responsibility and that extra responsibility, which is deeply concerning. I am interested in the suggestions from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, on how we might look at that regulation. I do not have a view on that yet, but I would be interested in the debate.

I note that, a year ago, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Investment Fraud and Fairer Financial Services—I declare I am a Member—published a report on the effectiveness, or not, of the FCA, and blamed it for doing too little, too late, and doing nothing to prevent or punish alleged wrongdoing, with errors being all too common. That is really important, given that we are giving it oversight over some significantly increased powers for trustees, where trustees will not be referring back to members of the scheme.

Finally, I come to the fun bit. Given that this is the last contribution from a Member of the Green group for this session before Christmas, I sincerely thank all the staff—the doorkeepers, clerks, Library, catering, security and cleaning staff—for the many hours they have laboured for us, all too often hours very late in the evening. To offer a wish for all of them and all of us, my hope for 2026 is that we might see more sensible working hours for your Lordships’ House and for all our staff.