Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Bill

Lord Sharkey Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 3rd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharkey (LD)]

My Lords, I can be very brief. We support this Bill and congratulate the honourable Mary Robinson MP on seeing the necessity for it, devising it and seeing its safe passage through the Commons. During that passage, the Bill attracted widespread and enthusiastic support from all sides, including from the Government themselves.

The Bill clearly fixes what could have been an extremely unfortunate loophole, and I confess to some chagrin that we did not spot the loophole at an earlier stage. I had thought that we had been pretty thorough—and lengthy—in our scrutiny. It is surely obvious that we should prevent trustees or fund managers who are fined for breach of the dashboard regulations reimbursing themselves from the funds of which they are trustees or managers. Equivalent prohibitions already exist for other aspects of pensions governance, and we clearly need to add the Bill’s prohibitions to that list.

We would also like to speed the progress of this Bill through this House, ideally unamended, to ensure that the loophole is closed quickly. We want to be able to prevent, for example, reimbursements for fines levied for failures to meet the required target dates for connection to the MaPS dashboard—although, as the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, just pointed out, that may not be quite so pressing as it was before yesterday.

Having said all that, there are just a few areas in which I would welcome a little more detail from the noble Lord, Lord Young, who has introduced this Bill with his customary clarity and fluency. I understand that for a breach of the dashboard regulations, such as a failure to connect to MaPS on time, TPR can issue a penalty notice of up to £5,000 where the trustee or manager is an individual, or up to £50,000 where the person is a body corporate. These do not seem to me to be very large amounts, especially given the resources available to large pension funds. How were these amounts decided on and why is it thought they will prove an adequate deterrent to noncompliance with the regulations?

I understand that, under the terms of the Bill in Clause 1, the penalty imposed for use of the pension funds to reimburse managers for fines imposed for breach of the regulations would be, on summary conviction, a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum and, if convicted on indictment, a maximum of a two-year prison sentence, a fine or both. What is the level of the statutory maximum fine, is there is a similar limit to the fine levied for conviction on indictment—because that does not does not appear to be clear in the Bill—and could the noble Lord say, for these penalties, as for the penalties for breach of the regulations themselves, how they were arrived at and how they were assessed as providing sufficient punishment for breaching, or disincentive to breach, the regulations? Finally, I ask the noble Lord for reassurance that the extent of the recovery of any funds illegally diverted as reimbursement for fines will be taken into account when deciding the appropriate penalty for that action.

I conclude by once again congratulating Mary Robinson and the noble Lord, Lord Young, on this Bill and wishing it a speedy passage.