Public Service Pensions Bill

Debate between Lord Flight and Lord Hutton of Furness

Wednesday 19th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hutton of Furness]

My Lords, it is always a great privilege to speak in your Lordships’ House. I think we all feel that privilege and responsibility very acutely if we also feel a sense of parental responsibility towards the legislation. I confess that I feel some parental responsibility for this Bill.

A little context might not go amiss. We should all remind ourselves how significant a part public service pensions play in our savings culture in the United Kingdom. Today, it has been estimated that about 12 million people have a direct stake in a public service pension scheme. That is one in five of the total UK population. They are hugely significant. About 85% of those who are employed directly in the public service contribute to one of those pension schemes. In other words, they are doing exactly what successive Governments, we in this House and those in another place have urged employees to do for a very long time, which is to do the right thing, to act responsibly and to prepare for the time when they may no longer be economically active. They are making a sacrifice now to enjoy the rewards when they retire.

All of those things are really good and we should try to hold on to them in this debate. Most people in the public sector are saving for their retirement. As many noble Lords who have spoken in the debate so far have confirmed, that is not the case in the private sector today. The contrast with the private sector is pretty stark. Probably only about one-third of the private sector workforce participates in an employer-sponsored scheme of any kind and those numbers are going down—they are not increasing. That is a huge problem and even with that context, many in the private sector who are contributing are not saving enough.

Successive Governments have been trying to address this formidable challenge and my noble friend Lord Turner has done sterling work for the country in proposing the reforms he did a few years ago. I hope that we are now beginning to head very much in the right direction. Given the importance of public service pension schemes, in this House we should try to do all that we can to ensure their long-term sustainability. We also need to ensure their adequacy. We face a huge demographic challenge. I do not think that the price that we should pay as a society for becoming older is that more and more old people retire in poverty. We face that risk right now and I do not think that we should compound it by ill-thought-through reforms to public service pensions.

I hope it is clear to your Lordships' House that the Bill will help us to achieve those important public policy goals. I welcome the new legislative framework that this measure will introduce. I hope it will provide the necessary underpinning to secure the long-term future for public service pensions, which is a very important objective. As we all know, no legislation is perfect; we have not yet devised that sort of procedure. I say to the Minister, for whom I have very high personal regard, that the Bill is certainly not a flawless piece of drafting. Many who have spoken in this debate have highlighted those areas where there is scope for improving the Bill in its later stages in your Lordships’ House.

However, today we are debating the principles of the Bill, and these I can strongly support. So far, no one has mentioned what these principles might be, so perhaps your Lordships will allow me to make a few important points that I think need to be made. I see these principles as, first, trying to find the right way to respond to the challenge of demographic change in a fair way, so that we strike a better balance between what employees pay and what taxpayers pay for these schemes. Secondly—this is a hugely important advance in the Bill—we need to ensure that the schemes themselves are fair to those saving within them; and that is absolutely not the case in the vast majority of public service pension schemes at the moment. Only the new Civil Service scheme is a career average scheme; the final salary schemes that make up the rest of the public service pension schemes are essentially unfair to the people we should be most concerned about—those in the public sector who earn the least. It is those people who earn the least in a final salary pension scheme who subsidise the pensions of those who earn the most. That is profoundly unfair, and this Bill will remove that unfairness from the public service schemes.

The Bill will also ensure that pension schemes are better governed in the future than they are now. This is not just a bit of process that we tend to get fixated by; it is a very important principle. Through better governance, there is a prospect that these schemes can command the confidence of both employees and employers alike.

Successive Governments have recognised the need for reform in this area if these pension schemes are to be sustained and supported for the long term. Costs have been rising dramatically in recent years, and it was clear in my report that that was set to continue for some time to come. The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and the noble Lord, Lord Flight, referred to these increased costs in their contributions. It is true that the increase in these costs has been borne largely by taxpayers, not scheme members, and I took a very strong view in my report that that was an unsustainable benchmark for the future.

However, it is very difficult to think about short-term measures that we can take to reduce the inevitable rise in costs, because that rise is driven by a number of factors. It is driven largely by scheme members’ accrued rights and by the increasing number of people retiring from these schemes. Unless we are prepared either to reduce those rights or to further increase contributions to those schemes, this is a cost that we will have to manage as best we can. After the 3% increase in contributions that the Government have required scheme members to make, I doubt that there is a way of controlling these costs through further contribution increases unless we are going to drive hundreds of thousands of people out of these schemes altogether. That would represent not an advantage to the taxpayer but very much a loss.

The previous Government introduced higher pension ages for new entrants and cap-and-share arrangements to try to share risk more equitably between taxpayers and employees. I welcome all of those reforms. They were necessary and the right thing to do. However, in my two reports of 2010 and 2011, I set out in some detail why I thought that these important reforms had not gone far enough. Your Lordships will be delighted to know that I do not intend to rehearse these arguments in any detail today. It was quite clear from the debate after the publication of my report that not everyone shared my analysis. That is a feature of our democracy and I have no problem with that. However, I did try to set out the facts as I saw them and to try to draw the right conclusions from them. For me, they pointed very strongly to the need for further reform.

I am glad that we have found a way to sustain defined benefits schemes into the foreseeable future—I regard that as a very big gain—and I am delighted that the Government did not take a slash-and-burn approach to solving this problem. That would have served only to impoverish future generations and would almost certainly have led to higher welfare costs. That would have been entirely the wrong thing to do. It would have undermined the personal responsibility that we have to encourage in the UK among all those in the workforce, whether in the private or public sector, to save for their retirement. I am glad that that is not the Government’s intention.

It was very clear from this debate and from other debates that people are beginning to recognise that public service pensions are far from being the gold-plated employee benefit that some people have claimed. I hope that today we can dispense with that myth. On the whole, public service pensions provide, on average, fairly modest retirement incomes. However, without reform there would be a danger of these costs eventually spiralling out of control. That would put at risk what I think is really important in this debate, which is the necessary public support to sustain these pensions over the long term. So again, I think that the Government have very much taken the right path in bringing this Bill forward.

That is all well and good. The principles are sound and robust and will withstand criticism from inside and outside the House. However, it is probably necessary, too, to refer to where I think the Bill needs further work. It is not a simple piece of legislation. There are a number of areas where I hope it can be improved during its progress through your Lordships’ House. One thing on which I reached a very firm view during the course of my commission, and particularly afterwards in the public debate that ensued, is that if we have any prospect of building support for pension reform, and if it is to command a strong consensus, it absolutely must be built on a solid foundation of trust and confidence in the nature of the changes and, equally, in the way that those changes will be implemented and delivered. I accept that this is what Ministers have sought to do in the clauses of the Bill, but it is here that I have the greatest concerns over the current drafting.

I have three concerns that I want to raise this afternoon. I have already stressed the importance of good governance and how central that is to building confidence and support for these schemes going forward. I welcome the establishment of the new pension boards. That was the instrumental part of my filed set of recommendations and it is absolutely the right thing to do. I am convinced, in particular, of the need for employee representation on these boards. This is not spelt out on the face of the Bill but it needs to be. We should remind ourselves that in private sector schemes there is a legal requirement for a third of the trustees to be employee nominations, and there is a very strong case for something similar for the pension boards that the Bill will set up. This is not a bit of window dressing; it is absolutely fundamental to good governance and the building of strong support for these schemes. Again, I have reason to believe that this is very much what the Government are thinking about, and I hope that somehow they can convert their intentions into the Bill, because that will do the Bill a lot of good and give it a strong tail wind. I think that would be important.

Many in this debate have raised the position of accrued rights and how they are to be protected. That was absolutely part of my recommendations. In my report I recommended that the Bill should contain a definition of what these rights are. We tend to assume that we know what they are. They are not spelt out anywhere in the Bill. We do not have a definition for the purpose of the public sector pension schemes of what an accrued right is. We all probably think we know that, but I think that if we were all asked what it was, we would all come up with a completely different set of understandings. For those in private sector defined benefit schemes, there is a statutory definition of these accrued rights in the 1995 legislation, and there would be some benefit if the Bill were to take a similar path.

The issue of how accrued rights are to be protected is important, too. We will not build confidence and long-term sustainability in these schemes if there is any sense that what you have paid for can somehow be taken away from you. That, I am afraid, is a possible interpretation that could be placed on Clause 3. So I do not believe that the Bill in its present form is quite good enough. The danger of retrospective changes to accrued rights would strike very much at the heart and soul of building support for the savings culture, and we should not allow that to pass unchecked.

[Lord Flight]

If the noble Lord thinks that the growing cash-flow deficit cannot be solved by increasing contributions and should not be solved by changing benefits, how is he going to solve it?