Automatic Enrolment (Earnings Trigger and Qualifying Earnings Band) Order 2014

Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Baroness Drake

Monday 10th February 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Drake]

I do not want to be too difficult. However, the Secretary of State has stated clearly that this is driven by his view that people should not be auto-enrolled into pensions until they start paying tax. That is not doing a balancing act; that has been the Government’s consistent position since 2010. The Hansard record shows that I keep asking the question, “Are you going to keep tracking the tax threshold, because if you keep doing that you will exclude more and more women?”. That is not a balancing act. If you did a balancing act, you would say, “What is the balance between that approach and the number of women excluded?”.

The Government have locked themselves in, both by the Secretary of State’s statement and by their behaviour since 2010, when they said that people who do not pay tax should not have the advantage of auto-enrolment. The benefit of releasing them from a certain level of tax is reduced by the fact that they lose the employer’s contribution, and we are now getting to a point where the gain from the increase in the tax threshold is less than the loss of the 3% of the employer’s contribution. So over their lifetime, the low-paid person is actually worse off.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, before the Minister answers that, I asked him whether he felt that the way in which the Government have designed the service served women well. His defence appeared to be that there has to be a line somewhere. The point I was trying to put to him is that the Government have designed this scheme in such a way that only a third of its target population are women; in other words, they have designed a scheme that will benefit two men for every woman. Does he feel that the way the Government have chosen to design the scheme benefits women?

Pensions Bill

Debate between Baroness Sherlock and Baroness Drake

Monday 13th January 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Drake]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 54. Amendments 53 and 54 are tabled in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Hollis. They provide for a report on the periodic review of the rules about pensionable age, having regard to life expectancy and other factors, to be prepared by an independent commission.

There is an important role for an independent commission, while recognising that the Government of the day would determine the policy that is brought to Parliament. The demographic challenge poses unavoidable choices, which are partly for society to make and partly for individuals. However, for those choices to be rational and sustainable, they have to be informed, barriers have to be removed and a broad consensus has to be achieved. One of the useful roles of an independent commission is to present society with those difficult but unavoidable choices. It can spell out the facts and choices clearly and starkly. It can identify the complexities. That process will also assist the parties in reaching a political consensus.

Public debate on policy changes will be better focused and more likely to arrive at consensus if there is a permanent independent body charged with presenting to society the evidence and the issues. A commission can provide the public with a clear and comprehensive narrative about what is happening and what it means. Delivering a sustainable state and private pension system and responding to the demographic challenge are long-term projects that cannot be delivered in the lifetime of any one Government.

A consensus needs to be held over a long policy framework, because optimal outcomes take decades to come through. However, securing and maintaining a consensus will not be easy, because deciding the way forward involves important political judgments, and successive Governments have focused very often on immediate challenges. Trade-offs are the essence of political debate, but achieving some degree of consensus on core principles will be easier to achieve if there is an independent commission supporting that consensus. We know that the long-term management of public finances requires intensive debate now about the state pension age—but, notwithstanding the desirability of continuity in policy being achieved, the detail of pension and associated policies will and should be subject to continuing debate over time, in the light of new information becoming available.

Life expectancy and healthy life expectancy may change significantly from current forecasts, trends in voluntary private pension savings could turn out to be more or less favourable, and the participation rate of older workers in the labour force may prove problematic. As the information available changes, so the precise public policy direction can be refined, even if the overall framework of the system maintains as much continuity as possible. It is important that an independent commission should consider the sort of issues and complexities that we all referred to in the previous debate.

As to the type of commission, it should be small, so that the quality of engagement between commissioners is dynamic and qualitative, but sufficient in number to allow for wider input and for the stimulation of considerations that an individual by definition could not achieve. The commission could become a source of authoritative and independent presentation of the facts, and of the estimates of public expenditure consequences and of what future rises in the state pension age might be implied by the principle of pension ages rising in proportion to life expectancy increases. A commission could maintain a clear and steady focus.

The report could capture the key trends in life expectancy and the differences in morbidity, employment and retirement patterns among older people, by gender, region, occupation and socio-economic classes. This analysis would also allow early and regular identification of whether increases in state pension age are accompanied by increases in productive employment and/or a greater reliance on means-tested benefits and whether major inequalities in healthy life expectancy can make across-the-board increases in retirement ages feasible or unfeasible.

For example, if state pension ages rise and average retirement ages rise, state pension expenditure as a percentage of GDP will be reduced, not only by a pension expenditure reduction but by a rise in GDP. However, if pension ages rise and average retirement ages do not, the reduction in pension expenditure will be offset by other non-pension benefit expenditure and lower GDP. These issues are matters of some moment when we are looking to achieve sustainability in the light of what is a major demographic challenge.

Engaging the public is important. Individuals consistently underestimate their own life expectancy. Research confirms that. Individuals on average are unaware of, or do not believe, the projected increases in life expectancy—in some instances, even when the evidence is presented to them. Such attitudes make it difficult for people, particularly young people, to think rationally about the savings rate/retirement age/pension level trade-off that they personally and society face. An independent commission would assist in changing those attitudes and getting those key messages across in a way that very often government and political parties cannot do successfully.

The commission’s analysis could also identify the latest trends in private pension provision on average and across different gender, socio-economic and ethnic groups, and thus of the overall coverage and adequacy of pension provision. This analysis coming from an independent commission could assist in future debates about appropriate adjustments in employee or employer default contribution rates. This is a not insignificant matter and a key debate—one that people are probably feeling tentative about in view of other, wider considerations, but one which certainly an independent commission would help address, as well as helping the formation of a political consensus.

In the debates on previous amendments we heard much reference to data—the quality of the data, what they show, their integrity, whether they are sufficient and so forth. The quality of choices made and policy decisions taken is directly influenced by the quality, quantity and type of data that are available. An independent commission would be well placed to interrogate the quality of the data available and to make recommendations on the gaps or omissions in the data collected, and on the data needed to inform debate.

As the Minister conceded in an earlier discussion, there is a need to take a long-term view on these issues. In considering those long-term issues, long-term projections also need to focus on the uncertainty inherent in such analysis and on important sensitivity analysis. These are issues that a standing commission could focus on. It could assist in helping the debate and in helping the quality of government and individual decisions.

To repeat what I said at the beginning, one of the useful roles of an independent commission is to present society with difficult but unavoidable choices. It can spell out the facts and choices clearly, and it can identify the complexities and assist government and political parties in making the type and quality of decisions that are necessary in the light of the challenges that we face. I beg to move.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 55 and 57A in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Browne of Ladyton. I shall speak also to Amendments 53 and 54 in the names of my noble friends Lady Hollis and Lady Drake.

As we heard in the very clear speech from my noble friend Lady Drake, Amendments 55 and 57A provide that the periodic review of rules on pension age should be prepared by an independent commission. I can think of no one better to suggest how a pensions commission might work than my noble friend Lady Drake, who was such a distinguished member of the Turner commission.

As I indicated previously, we agreed that there should be periodic reviews of the state pension age to reflect changes in longevity and the need for people to fund their retirement and also to achieve a fair balance between generations. The question is how to achieve that, and we have grave concerns about the way in which the Government are approaching this matter.

As it stands, the Bill simply says that the Secretary of State shall review the rules about pensionable age. That leaves us with some significant gaps. There is insufficient information about the kind of review mechanism that there might be. There is also insufficient detail about who will conduct a review or how it is to be done, and there seems, on the face of it, to be insufficient scrutiny by Parliament of any recommendations that emerge. Perhaps the Minister will clarify that for us when he replies.

At the heart of this lies a very important question: how do we enable people to have confidence in the system? If we want to encourage people to save for their retirement and we need them to save more, they need to trust the Government, to trust Parliament and to believe that their pensions are safe in our hands. The public need to know that they will not be at the mercy of political expediency and will be protected from any adjustments that might otherwise be made too quickly. After all, they may be nervous about this. There has been a succession of changes to pensions legislation, pensions levels and the state pension age. To suggest just one example, under the previous Labour Government the number of years of contributions required to get a basic state pension—