Pension Schemes Bill

Baroness Oppenheim-Barnes Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradley]

We now come to the very important issue of the guidance guarantee. In Committee we debated a number of significant issues that this amendment addresses. However, I would like to probe the Government a little further on the arrangements for providing guidance through Citizens Advice and the Pensions Advisory Service.

Specifically, I am seeking assurances that those two organisations are capable of delivering the guidance and that the quality of the guidance will be consistently high across the two delivery partners. Key to this is that the delivery agencies receive the funding they need to deliver a quality advice service for those who request it. The whole purpose of this is to ensure that when the pensions freedoms and flexibilities are introduced in April, people have the quality guidance to make the crucial decisions about their retirement income.

Guidance—not advice, which is a regulated function—will be available from April 2015 to assist all the 600,000 people due to retire next year, or those who have deferred making decisions about their annuities until the legislation is passed, together with any 55 to 65 year-olds who are thinking of cashing in their pension pot. Further demand for the service may also come from younger people as the Treasury has said that people in their 50s or even 40s may be eligible for guidance.

In the debate on the previous amendment, we talked about unforeseen consequences of the legislation. I hope— this is just a background comment—that we are not in a position that a previous Government were in in the 1980s, when we blundered into a massive pension reform without thinking through all the implications. As Black and Nobles said in “Personal Pensions Misselling”, as quoted in The Blunders of Our Governments:

“No-one looked at pensions as posing particular problems because no-one knew or thought to look”.

To her credit, my noble friend Lady Turner was pretty much a lone voice in the debate in this House in raising concerns about that Bill, and concluded in a speech on 11 July 1986 that it was “vital” that people buying personal pensions should be offered adequate protection. I am very pleased that my noble friend is in the Chamber this afternoon.

It is against this background that we still have concerns and questions about how guidance will be organised and delivered in practice. These concerns include: people who decide to cash in their pension pots or to move money into complex draw-down products when an annuity may still have been their better option; the potential for product scams and whether the introduction of the criminal offence, although welcome, will be enough to deter the proliferation of what the Financial Times called “whizzbang investment schemes”; that the Financial Conduct Authority will not be specifically regulating the guidance guarantee; that the guidance will not be comprehensive enough to ensure that people fully appreciate the consequences of the decisions they make; and that all government policy has not been thoroughly thought through and clarified, because unless the policy is clear, the guidance staff will be put at a great disadvantage.

We know now that in the first instance the Government have allocated £35 million to the guidance service to recruit around 300 staff for the Pensions Advisory Service and Citizens Advice. It is still not clear how this amount has been calculated. Has the Minister made any further assessment of the likely take-up of the guidance from the first tranche of, say, the 600,000 people who may seek such guidance? As was pointed out in Committee, there has been a huge variation in projections on this point, from the Legal & General study of 9,000 people being offered free advice but with only a 2.5% take-up, to the Chartered Insurance Institute, which predicted a 90% take-up.

Further, has an estimate been made of the proportion of people who will seek guidance by phone from the Pensions Advisory Service and those who will seek a face-to-face interview delivered by the citizens advice bureaux? Without such an assessment, it is difficult to understand how demand for the service will be managed by the different delivery agencies.

Next I will deal with qualifications and training. These issues have been explored well by outside commentators, including Radio 4’s “Money Box” programme, Money Marketing and other specialist pension advisers. It has been noted that TPAS is recruiting telephone advice workers at a salary of around £30,000 per annum. Applicants are expected to have five years’ experience of pension work and advice and, ideally, a relevant qualification. However, the CABs are recruiting people for face-to-face work on salaries of around £18,000 to £24,000. Applicants there need merely to be numerate, and knowledge of pensions is desirable but not essential.

Further, the Treasury has said:

“All Citizens Advice and TPAS staff delivering the pensions guidance will receive intensive and detailed technical training prior to April 2015. They will be tested to ensure they have the necessary pensions knowledge before they talk to the public. They will also have access to a programme of continuous professional improvement”.

However, Barnett Waddingham, senior consultant and former TPAS chief executive Malcolm McLean has said:

“You can train people until you are blue in the face, but they need to have a starting point of knowledge. Citizens Advice seems to think that you can take people with absolutely no pensions knowledge and train them up in a few weeks’ time. Why is it asking for such a different level of pensions knowledge to TPAS? Arguably the face-to-face service is more difficult, because you are on your own in a room with someone”.

Is the Minister satisfied that staff recruited will be of sufficient quality to deliver the service? “Money Box” suggested that the face-to-face service could be second class compared with TPAS. Will he confirm that to date TPAS has recruited only 20 extra staff. Crucially, will he confirm that the intensive and detailed technical training will be completed when the system goes live in April?

My next questions are about coverage of the face-to-face service being provided by the citizens advice bureaux. In Committee, it was pointed out that Citizens Advice has a network of some 300 bureaux across the country, but the specialist pension guidance staff would be located in only 44 offices. In the light of the International Longevity Centre study that suggested that 63% of people seeking guidance would prefer a face-to-face interview, are 44 centres sufficient to meet the demand from April? Can the Minister confirm that these are sufficient? Have the Government made any estimation of the maximum waiting time for an appointment at one of these centres? If there is a delay in getting an appointment, a decision could be made about pension pots that is not in the best interest of the customer.

Since there are only 44 centres, what is the maximum distance that a person will have to travel to get guidance, and has account been taken of the distribution of these centres for public transport for those who may need it? In terms of the day-to-day operations of the service, will the offices be open early in the morning or late in the evening, or at weekends, particularly for those people who are in employment? Further, on the money allocated for the service, will the Minister again assure us that the invaluable work undertaken by CAB staff for some of the most vulnerable people in local communities will not be affected by the pensions work and that no funding provided by local authorities will be used by CABs for pensions guidance? Will the Minister also confirm that each interview will last up to 45 minutes and that the designated guidance adviser, as the CAB worker will be known, will just lay out the options for the customer to consider? Will the customer after a period of reflection be entitled to further consultation, or will they then have to seek paid independent financial advice?

Will the Minister confirm what the complaints procedure will be? Will the customer first complain to the CAB and what form will that take? If it is not resolved, will it then be passed to an independent adjudicator approved by the Treasury? Can the Minister give details about how that independent adjudicator service will work? If the complaint remains unresolved, will the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman then intervene, but only with the support of a Member of Parliament? Is this all correct, and will the Minister give full details of the complaints procedure? If he cannot do so today, can he tell us when it will be published?

Finally, will the Minister give us an absolute assurance that both the TPAS and the CAB service will be ready to go live from April, in barely eight weeks’ time, not only in England and Wales but in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and that there will be clarity on all policy areas so that those delivering the guidance are able to give accurate information to the customer?

At the heart of the amendment is our wish to ensure that the Bill works in the way that is intended and that the guidance will be available, taken up and prove effective in helping people to choose the right products to fund their retirement, and to make the right decisions about lump sums or other retirement income. To date, this House has been provided with too little information about the guidance to be offered. At this late stage, we must be satisfied that the guidance will be fit for purpose and will address all the issues that the public will need to consider in order to make one of the most important decisions of their lives. I beg to move.

[Baroness Oppenheim-Barnes (Con)]

My Lords, this Bill is a very welcome reform and has been met with a good deal of justified praise. I, too, have concerns about the possibility of the citizens advice bureaux being able to take on such another role—and to do it effectively, because I have the greatest admiration for it having dealt with it over many years. Its staff are all volunteers. They do not necessarily have specialised knowledge. Those who have had training in dealing with the pensions market are scattered quite thinly, as has already been said by the noble Lord, Lord Bradley. We had not very long ago two big Bills which imposed new duties on the citizens advice bureaux, the most recent being the Consumer Rights Bill and, before that, the regulatory reform Bill. They were given extra sums of money, which were not overgenerous, because they now have to give specialised information. I know that big-shot financial advisers often get things very wrong and they are supposed to be experts, so a great onus is being placed on the citizens advice bureau that I am concerned about. These are very important matters; this is a very important and welcome Bill; and I hope that my noble friend will be able to say something that is helpful and pacifies my concerns.