Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Dean Russell and Guy Opperman

Monday 23rd January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Guy Opperman]

It is our intention to have jobs fairs, sector-based work academies and local recruitment on an ongoing basis. I am happy to discuss with the hon. Lady, whom I have worked with many times in the past, how we can do things in her patch.

[Dean Russell (Watford) (Con)]

14. What progress his Department has made on filling vacancies in the job market in Watford constituency.

[The Minister for Employment (Guy Opperman)]

The Department for Work and Pensions is assisting businesses across the country, particularly in Watford, to ensure we fill the vacancies by supporting people back into work. In Watford, the jobcentre is doing sterling work, helping local and national employers to deliver recruitment days, job fairs, sector-based work academies and work trials to help to fill those vacancies.

[Dean Russell]

I once again co-hosted the Watford jobs fair late last year, working with the excellent jobcentre team. We had more than 30 employers in attendance, from KFC to His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service, Smyths Toys to Warner Bros. and Hilton Hotels & Resorts to West Herts College. However, a common theme raised with me was the lack of interview attendance by applicants. Will my hon. Friend assure me that activities are under way to ensure that interviews are attended so that we can get people back to work? May I also invite him to visit Watford to see the great work in practice?

[Guy Opperman]

What an offer—I would be delighted to visit Watford and to thank the excellent team who work at the Watford jobcentre. In answer to my hon. Friend’s question, yes, claimants are expected to take reasonable steps to move into and progress in work, including attending jobs fairs and interviews with employers.

Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Bill

Debate between Dean Russell and Guy Opperman

2nd reading
Friday 15th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Guy Opperman)]

What an honour it is to speak today. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) for having the foresight to move the Second Reading of her Bill and for her excellent contribution to the debate. I can confirm that the Government fully intend to support the Bill today.

As you will be aware, Madam Deputy Speaker, this is my seventh day in the job as Minister for pensions; I hope to be better than my predecessor. The bottom line is that it is an honour to do this job and try to address the genuine issue that the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) raises, which is that we need to get this country saving more. With great respect, we are doing that. The state pension has almost doubled since 2010, thanks to the triple lock and the work of the coalition Government and the Conservative Government: it was worth less than £100 shortly before the 2010 election and is now worth up to £185-plus. As taxpayers, we are paying out well over £100 billion to our pensioners. We are providing huge amounts of support.

Automatic enrolment has been a massive success story under successive Governments. The simple truth is that automatic enrolment has meant constituents up and down the country saving in a way that never happened before. The proportion of young people saving with a workplace pension was less than 30% prior to 2012; it is now above 80%. For women with pension savings in a workplace context, the figure was less than 42%; it is now above 80% as well. These are transformational things. For example, in your constituency of Epping Forest, Madam Deputy Speaker, 13,000 people are now saving for a workplace pension. The Bill will genuinely help them to navigate things an awful lot better, so I am very pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle has introduced it.

[Dean Russell (Watford) (Con)]

The pensions dashboard is incredibly important and my constituents will probably be asking what it means for them. I am also very conscious that we have a digital divide; I have been campaigning for online accessibility for probably 20 years. I would be interested to know, first, how we can ensure that we do not put people in a position where they cannot get the information, and secondly what the roll-out means for Watford.

[Guy Opperman]

It matters tremendously to Watford, and I will tell my hon. Friend why: in Watford, 45,000 constituents are benefiting from a workplace pension under automatic enrolment. That is a transformational thing that was genuinely not there barely 10 years ago.

We all support the pensions industry, but it has basically been existing in the 19th century. With the pensions dashboard, we have jumped over the entire 20th century and into the 21st by bringing things online. The pensions dashboard will take pensions—all 40,000 schemes up and down the country in the private and public sector and the state pension—and make them all accessible via iPads, mobile phones and computers. That is transformational.

I am old enough to have met my bank manager—a person whom I used to go and see and have a conversation with. That never happens any more, yet, with the banking and savings apps that many of us now have, the way we engage with our bank is transformational compared with days gone by. We hope that people will have a pensions app so that, as they take the bus or train to work, they can look at their bank account, their savings account and their pensions at the same time and move money between them.

This process started under the Pension Schemes Act 2021, which genuinely transformed the digital divide. The 20-year campaign of my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell), both outside and inside Parliament, is seeing the fruits of his labours. This will make our lives easier, putting it bluntly, because we will have accessible information on an ongoing basis. It will make things simpler by enabling us to make decisions as consumers in a way we never have before, and it will make things better by providing a greater understanding of how to control our money. Surely that is something for which we all strive.

The Government support this Bill, and it is an honour to be here on a day when the House has taken forward four Bills, including the Shark Fins Bill, the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Bill and the Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Bill, which is particularly relevant to my good self as I have suffered loss. I listened to those debates with great interest, and I totally support the Bills.

This Bill is of great importance as we seek to make pensions safer, better and greener. As the hon. Member for Cheadle indicated, with record numbers of people saving for retirement it is more important than ever that people understand their pensions information and prepare for financial security in later life. Dashboards will unquestionably make people do that.

The Department for Work and Pensions published a consultation on the draft pensions dashboard regulations earlier this year, and only yesterday we published the response to that consultation, setting out in detail that we are fully committed to driving forward pensions dashboards and making them happen at the earliest opportunity.

The Bill will increase protections for pension savers by prohibiting trustees and managers of occupational and personal pension schemes from being reimbursed out of scheme assets in respect of penalties imposed on them by any future dashboard regulations. The Bill will achieve this by amending section 256 of the Pensions Act 2004, under which, if a trustee or manager were to be reimbursed and knew or had reasonable grounds to believe that they had been so reimbursed, they would be guilty of a criminal offence unless they had taken all reasonable steps to prevent it. For those found guilty, the provisions allow for a maximum sentence of up to two years in prison or a fine, or both.

Additionally, were any amount to be paid out of a scheme’s assets in such a way, the Pensions Regulator would have the power to issue civil penalties to any trustee or manager who failed to take all reasonable steps to secure compliance. Section 256 of the 2004 Act already prohibits reimbursement of penalties issued under a number of other pieces of pensions legislation, including automatic enrolment. We therefore consider the proposed amendment to that Act to be a very logical and welcome change.

My hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Darren Henry) is a fantastic champion for his constituency, for which I thank him. He has spoken repeatedly in this House of the importance of pensions to his constituents, and I can tell him that 29,000 of his constituents have been automatically enrolled into a workplace pension. This is of massive importance to his constituents.

My hon. Friend raised two points that I will briefly address. First, we are talking about a significant number of pensions, because the average person will have several pots as they continue to work. They might have a job at the age of 18, 21, 24 or 26 before moving to another job. The dashboard starts out as a tracing service, as we have discussed. We already have the Pension Tracing Service, which allows people to seek and identify any lost pensions, but the dashboard will take that so much further. Individuals will be able to access in a safe way all their pensions, make decisions on consolidation and consider their options and possible outcomes in a way that they never could before. This is proper, modern, Conservative, consumer-focused politics that is genuinely transformational for the British people. I am so pleased that my hon. Friend supports that. It is important for his constituents that we support them, not just with workplace pensions.

As I outlined earlier, the support through the state pension has doubled effectively over the past 12 years. The Government are also bringing forward other support, whether it is the specific cost of living support that landed in a million of our constituents’ accounts—£326, and there will be £324 later this year—or whether it is the extra £300 in winter fuel payments for all our pensioner constituents, or the £400 that will go to households that are registered as recipients of energy, along with the energy support grant that will land in October and November. All those packages will be there to support constituents as they cope with the difficulties that have been caused fundamentally by the war in Ukraine and the energy war that we are effectively engaged in with Putin.

[Dean Russell]

I appreciate my hon. Friend sharing the updates on the pension and how it is helping my constituents. Whenever I speak to pensioners, they always mention the triple lock. Will he commit to the triple lock please?

[Guy Opperman]

I assure my hon. Friend that the triple lock will return this autumn, when legislation is brought back, as it has been every year, in the pensions uprating process. That is something that not just I but my right hon. Friends the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions have said, and it remains Government policy. My hon. Friend raises support for pensioners. I pray in aid and urge all colleagues on both sides of the House to get behind spreading awareness of pension credit. Most pensioner support is automatically provided. In other words, once someone is registered, upratings and the inclusion of greater sums such as the £300 winter fuel payment and the £400 energy support grant happen automatically. The key thing with pension credit is that you have to apply. So the message is, “Please don’t be shy, please apply.”

I was lucky enough to spend some time with Mr Len Goodman, to whom I am deeply grateful for his contributions. Fortunately there was no dancing by me, but the video that has been seen by more than 1 million people makes the case for pension credit. It is worth on average £3,300 to all our constituents who are vulnerable and have not claimed. That is something of great importance. We know that up and down the country, in every single constituency, there are hundreds of pensioners who have failed to claim pension credit. I urge them to contact their local citizens advice bureau, Christians Against Poverty, or other assistance organisation such as Age UK or others, for help to claim. They can also go to gov.uk or dial freephone 0800 991234. It applies across all communities. Yesterday I visited Punjabi Radio; we particularly want to reach BME communities.

In respect of the Bill, the Government are committed to making pensions safer, better and greener. We genuinely believe that the Bill makes pensions better through the pensions dashboard. The safety element is assisted by this small, discrete but very important Bill. We also have the capability to make pensions greener. We are the first country to bring in TCFD—the taskforce on climate-related financial disclosures. We are driving forward environmental, social and governance standards. Only today we issued our response to the call for evidence on the social element of ESG. Again, it is a world first for a country to look at this particular reform. Without a shadow of a doubt, the Bill will improve our ability to provide a proper deterrent which will prevent rogue trustees or managers from exploiting the pension assets for which they are responsible. The Government will therefore support the Bill’s passage through Parliament, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle—who is a doughty campaigner for her constituents —on ensuring that pensions are safer for the future.