Savings (Government Contributions) Bill (First sitting)

Huw Merriman Excerpts

Tuesday 25th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Lucy Frazer]

Is there anything that you would like to add?

Yvonne Braun: I completely agree that it will depend on the asset mix in the lifetime ISA. I am sure that an adviser would also take into account that 25% will be added, which will help to balance out the risk a bit. We are not sure that, beyond a first home purchase and terminal illness, which are currently in the Bill, additional lifetime events need to be included. If you take redundancy, there are other savings vehicles for that, so I am not necessarily sure that the state needs to step in with a Government contribution to support that. I would probably say the same for buying a second home—I take it that by that you do not mean buying an additional home, but moving the next step up and buying a bigger home.

Carol Knight: Not a holiday home, no.

Yvonne Braun: I think that the main pressure point in terms of housing seems to be for people to get on to the housing ladder in the first place because they are taking so long to get their deposit together. I think that issue is alleviated once people make the second step up.

[Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

Q I want to pick up on something that Ms Knight said, and I have two questions as a result. First, the complexity of this product has been talked about. If you add the critical illness and redundancy rationales for withdrawal, have you not just made it more complex and are you not turning it more into an assurance or insurance-based product as a result?

Carol Knight: I think it depends on how much you want to support people going through their life, and if it is going to be the fundamental of the lifetime ISA to help fund those important events as people go through them. It is a balancing game, really.

[Huw Merriman]

Q The second point was with regard to your suggestion to permit the product to be used for second home owners. Is there not a danger that we already have challenges as it is with first-time buyers getting into the housing market? Effectively giving Government subsidies to help second home purchasers would perhaps strike some as a bit much. What is your observation on that comment?

Carol Knight: Housing is a big problem in this country, without a doubt, and I think it needs to be part and parcel of a much bigger picture. People use housing as part of their retirement planning, which is an important factor to throw in. When you talk to people about how they are going to fund their retirement, the value of their house is very often part of that. The whole question of how housing is used as a source of income on retirement is very important.

It is very difficult for people to get a clear view of how much income they can take out of their home at the point of retirement. If they are not in a position where they can gradually build the value of their home during their working life, they will have less available through an equity release product or whatever mechanism is available to them. They will have less available in the way of funds for retirement. It is part and parcel of a much bigger picture. We should be looking at retirement saving as a whole and helping people to put different types of assets towards funding later life.

[Huw Merriman]

Thank you.

[Ian Blackford]

Q I want to come back to the issue of risk. We all know that when you invest in a pension scheme, the trustees will then look at the appreciation of risk that you would expect to take on board. They obviously look at the timeline of when you expect to retire and gear any assets according to that assessment.

If we have a situation here where an individual can invest in an ISA, and can invest up to 100% in equities, they may decide to draw down that pot at any time for a particular type of event. We know that there is always a risk of a downturn in the market. Most actuaries will tell you there is a one in seven year risk of a downturn in the market. Are we not inadvertently exposing consumers to risk? Does it not come back to the point that was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Banff and Buchan that we are exposing consumers to risk, not just of mis-selling, but of investing in an asset where there could be a risk of a downturn in the market seriously impacting the choices that they then make?

Carol Knight: There is always that risk, but I do not think we are looking at the lifetime ISA as an alternative to a pension. We are looking at it as complementary to a pension. Firstly, the lifetime ISA could go into a cash ISA, but as a long-term savings product it is generally accepted that cash is not necessarily the best way to do that. Again, it points to getting good guidance and information to people to help them make informed decisions as to the type of assets they are going to put into that product.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Whiteford]

Q Could you say a bit more about the sort of incentives that you think might actually help?

Tom McPhail: There was a lot of work done last year around the idea of a flat-rate incentive—breaking the link between pension incentives and the tax system altogether. There was quite a lot of support across the industry for that concept, with talk of around a 30% top-up as an alternative to tax relief. All contributions would be made out of net income, and when you made a contribution to a pension you would get a flat-rate top-up. I think there was quite a lot of traction for that idea.

I think we can go further, and it would be quite desirable to weight those incentives particularly towards younger savers. You could get the benefit of compounding. If the incentive were progressively reduced the older you got, it would provide a behavioural incentive, because with every year that passed, you would lose out. That is a very powerful message that the industry and the Government could harness: to say to people, “If you wait another year, your incentive will drop a little bit.” We have been working through some ideas on how we could develop that as an alternative incentive. Either way, you are taking it away from the current messy, unfair, lumpy, illogical tax-relief system that continues to operate today.

David Wren: I think complexity is definitely the enemy of success in getting people to save. There are lots of subdivisions of pensions and savings. Helping people to find the right place within that for their needs is really challenging. The risk of complexity is not just that people go into the wrong product for them at the start, but that they are put off by the whole experience. To give an analogy, it is very similar to internet sign-up processes: each additional question you add to an internet sign-up process puts off a disproportionate number of people from continuing through that process. Having a dozen different products out there with different features does not necessarily push people to the wrong one; it encourages inertia, where you simply cannot decide and therefore do not invest in any of them.

[Huw Merriman]

Q You keep touching on the complexity of this product. I have read the blurb in the overview of the Bill and I understand the eligibility criteria—I am too old—and the withdrawal terms. I am inviting you to bamboozle me, as it were. What is so complicated about this product that I am missing?

Tom McPhail: To the credit of the Treasury team that worked on this, they listened to feedback from the industry and were really good at working to create as simple a product as possible. My answer to you is that it is a lot simpler than it might have been.

When you ring us up, we will still have to walk you through the circumstances in which you will be eligible to take the money out without a penalty, and the circumstances in which you will be able to take money out but would have to pay a penalty, so there is still a customer engagement process that will have to be undertaken at the front end. I think I made the point in the brief written submission I sent in ahead of this session that the problem is not the product itself. The product itself is reasonably simple—there are simpler products, such as the cash ISA; that is really simple—but you have dropped a moderately simple product into a complicated landscape, and you have just made it more complicated.

That is exactly what happened when we launched stakeholder pensions getting on for 20 years ago. Stakeholder was simple, but it was dropped into a complicated landscape, and—guess what?—it made life more complicated. This is analogous to that.

David Wren: That is what will really cause the challenge. When someone tries to open one of these products, the first question is going to be, “What are you saving for? Is it a home or a pension?” If it is neither of those, this is probably not the right product for you. If you pick house purchase, you have to decide between the lifetime ISA and, at least in the short term, help to buy. People have said that the lifetime ISA looks better, because you are getting the Government top-up and earning growth on that, but you cannot have the money back without a Government penalty. The help to buy ISA does not have that, so if you need flexibility, help to buy might be better for you. If you go down the pensions route, we need to ask about whether you have maxed out auto-enrolment and taken full advantage of employer contributions, and whether a different pension route might be better for you, again recognising that there are different features as to whether you benefit or not.

It is worth adding that I have been involved in this since it was announced in March—my work has a tax background—and it is not immediately obvious to me whether I would be better off topping up my pension or putting money into a lifetime ISA. The reason for that is that I would need to know what tax rate I would pay on that money when I retire, and I do not know that. It is far from simple in any one of those particular places to work out which is the right thing for you. It requires value judgments about a number of the elements. The risk is that complexity leads to inertia and dissuades people from saving at all. There is not just the risk of going into the wrong product.

Just one final thing, which the previous panel touched on: because of the Government penalty on withdrawals—you lose not only the bonus, but 6.25% of your contributions, because of the way the numbers work—there is no easy exit route from a lifetime ISA. If you make a mistake and a month down the road you say, “Gosh, I’ve made a terrible mistake. I should have gone into a different product,” you will lose some of your money in getting that money back out and into another product. Again, we have real concerns about that and what it will mean for customers.

[Huw Merriman]

Q I have one more question. This takes me back to my misspent youth, more than 25 years ago, when for four years as a student I worked for Abbey National as a cashier and customer service adviser. We would sell this type of product. We had a whole suite of products that had penalties if, say, you were five years into a bond and withdrew early. This is not rocket science. We could explain that to our customers, and that was without the benefits of the internet. I am still a bit sceptical about why this landscape is so complex to your members; it does not seem that different, and we were easily able to sell things 25 years ago.

David Wren: The landscape has probably changed slightly in 25 years. We very much welcome the Financial Conduct Authority consultation on this, because its view on how we engage with customers and make sure that they get the right protections is really important. Yes, a range of products are available, but as Tom said earlier, a lot of people will now buy online, through a call centre or through an app, so they are not going to see someone face to face. Again, we need to make sure that people are given access to the right information to allow them to make the right decisions. That is absolutely doable, and, as I said earlier, we hope that the Government will work with us on getting the right information to people. It is the landscape that is complex, as opposed to the individual products.

[Ian Blackford]

Q David, in your submission, you say:

“In particular, there is a concern that cash held in LISAs will only be suitable for those looking to buy a home, whilst stocks and shares will be more suitable for those investing for later life, looking towards retirement.”

Is there not a risk that if an individual invests in stocks and shares and then buys a home at the wrong time because the market has fallen, we inadvertently expose consumers to risk as a consequence of this policy?

David Wren: I think that is exactly right. That is exactly why we need to make sure that people are getting the right support in picking a product, and in the underlying investment for that product. I am sure that Tom is more expert in this than I am, but for pensions, stocks and shares are typically viewed as the right investment. Those ups and downs will average out over the course of your life. I assume that most people are saving for a home in a relatively short time-window—five to 10 years. Stocks and shares are inherently more risky. The point at which you are starting a family and want to buy a home may be the point at which the market is not going through a particularly buoyant phase.

We also need to recognise that for a lot of people—bear in mind that lifetime ISAs are available from 18—buying a house is a medium-term activity. That may well be over a more than 10-year timeframe. That becomes a very challenging time. It is not obvious that cash is the right investment; it is not obvious that stocks and shares are the right investment. That is a very difficult decision for someone to make.