Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Evans of Rainow Excerpts

Tuesday 29th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

The legal challenge is in line with all legal challenges of this sort. To protect the British financial services sector, it is very important to try to challenge the proposal. There has been a House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee report on the cost of similar legal challenges. It is not excessive—it is £25,000 to £35,000, or of that order—but the point is that we in this Government are trying to align risk and reward, which is absolutely crucial for the success of the financial services sector.

[Graham Evans (Weaver Vale) (Con)]

3. What recent steps he has taken to make saving more flexible.

[The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr George Osborne)]

This Government believe that people who have worked hard and saved hard through their lives should be trusted with their own pension savings in retirement. That is why, following the Budget, we have already given people much greater access to their pension savings and why, from next April, they will have complete freedom of access to their defined contribution scheme.

[Graham Evans]

This year’s Budget exposed some people’s innate belief that those who have worked hard and saved all their lives could not be trusted with their own money. Will my right hon. Friend the Chancellor reassure savers in Weaver Vale that he rejects such patronising views, and will he update the House on his plans to let people choose how to spend their own money and to make savings far more flexible?

[Mr Osborne]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. The fact that the Labour party had nothing to say in response reflects the muddled approach: it did not support the measure, but it did not know what to do with a popular Budget proposal. We are absolutely clear that we reject the patronising view, pursued by the previous Government, that the state knows better than individuals how to spend their money. Trusting people, reducing taxes, supporting savers—that is this Government’s approach.