Pension Schemes Bill [HL]

Lord Stoneham of Droxford Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 1st November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Minister and to the House for being a few minutes late for the opening remarks in this debate and thank the authorities for allowing me none the less to speak. I want to make three initial, general points before looking at the details of the Bill.

The very fact that we are discussing this Bill shows the good progress that has been made on auto-enrolment. More than 6 million are now involved in it, with the proportion of people active in pensions going up all the time. This is good news. However, the House needs to realise that the really big task lies ahead as we move to a phase where higher contributions will be required and start to address the fact that people in the country as a whole are hugely undersaving for their pensions and retirement. The situation is not made any easier as young people find it increasingly difficult to move into a home of their own. We have a high level of consumer credit and no longer have the old paternalistic systems of final salary pension schemes. All the risk in pensions is now with the employee and the saver.

However, one reason why we have made good progress during the past 10 years is that we have had good, cross-party support for ongoing pension reforms. Therefore, on this side of the House, we agree that the growth of master trusts now needs some adjustment in terms of regulation and monitoring. I re-emphasise the point made by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie: that the last thing we need is any undermining of confidence in the pension savings, however inadequate they may be, that people are trying to make in the current circumstances. Anything that undermines that confidence will undermine everything that we are seeking to do here.

The third point I would like to make is an immediately political point and concerns the economic uncertainty that surrounds the country at the moment. I do not think we should underestimate the damage that is being done by low interest rates for pensions and pension saving and, particularly, to the valuation of annuities. I think it was recorded only the other day that 0.1% off interest rates contributes to an increase in the deficit of the Tesco pension fund of £300 million. That just shows the damage that is being done in the current circumstances. Let us not forget the high proportion of our pensioners living in Europe who have experienced a 20% reduction in their retirement income as a result of the exchange rate. We have to realise that, in the pension field, return on investment and economic growth is vital for pension growth in the future. I do not think that anybody will have voted for the current uncertainty if this uncertainty continues and undermines those three tenets of our economy.

Looking at the issues of the master trust, I make the overall point that regulation is necessary, but have we missed an opportunity in the Bill of opening things up so that these arrangements and proposals are much more proactive for the consumer and saver, actually encouraging their investment in the saving process? I am a bit surprised that the Government are not doing in parallel and together the proposed regulation of the master trust in the Bill and what they are doing to enhance and improve the advice that is available to pensioners and people saving for their pensions.

Everybody supports making the master trusts subject to good transparency. Those who are saving in them should know how they are performing, that they are being safeguarded because there is good regulation. People should also know what the investment strategy is and what the risk assessment is of the trusts that they are involved in. That should be absolutely clear. Those should be requirements of the regulation, and charges should be transparent. It is also important that accountability should not simply be to the regulator; it should be to those who are actually investing in their pension savings directly. I am not sure that the Bill goes far enough in trying to advance that and improve on it.

Given the Prime Minister’s ideas of putting people from the consumer and employee interests on boards, are there any thoughts about their being involved in these master trusts? Why is that not included in the Bill, or is it to be the subject of late amendments? That is one direct possibility that the Government could consider. Does the annual report simply have to go to the regulator? Why is an annual report not going to the individual contributors and savers in these trusts, so that they can see exactly how their money is being stewarded and looked after? What do we regard as “a fit and proper person”? I take the trivial example of my local football club, where I have had huge disillusionment in various authorities trying to define who are fit and proper people to run a club. What is required for people to be fit and proper to run pension trusts? It is not just qualifications; it is actually an analysis and keeping to account how they operate those trusts, how they operate as managers. How will that be done? That seems to me to be the most important thing.

Another opportunity missed in the Bill concerns the whole concept of the digital age. We have moved on in the last 10 years; we can now very easily communicate with people, providing we have their email addresses. Any excuse that it is more expensive to communicate regularly with individual savers is for the birds, frankly, because bodies can now do it quite easily. This would be a good time, when we are trying to get these bodies regulated for the first time, to put in a requirement that they should have those facilities. For them to be approved, they should have those facilities so that they can easily and cheaply communicate, not just with the regulator and the employers but with the individual savers and employees.

In addition, the Bill should have said a little more about the trigger mechanisms and the pause provisions, because those both talk about informing the employers, but there is very little about telling the employees. What happens to the employees or the individual savers when the pause provision is brought in? What will they be told? What will they be advised about the contributions that they might want to continue to make but will not be allowed to? Some consideration should have been given to that.

Another important aspect of this regulation is that there has been a huge growth in master trusts, but there may be a need or an opportunity for the encouragement of consolidation going forward. Is the regulator going to keep an account of the cost per saver indices for these various trusts so that there is some indication to people how efficient they are and an indication to their management of where they can get improvements in costs and efficiency so that they operate effectively?

My final point is related, and I have not heard much about it recently. When I last asked this question, I got an answer that took it straight into the long grass. Portable pensions were always seen as an important aspect of auto-enrolment. I return to the issue of pension pots. We have now been in this for a number of years. The type of people who are investing in these pensions are moving jobs all the time. We are probably already in a situation where people have more than one pot. I do not know what the average is; it would be interesting to know. What are the Government doing on the policy that we originally looked at under the previous Government with regard to encouraging people to consolidate their pension pots? It was originally proposed that the pots would follow the employee in whatever new job or saving arrangement they went into. What is the Government’s purpose in delaying regulating on that and what are their plans to address this issue? As time goes on, this problem will grow and it will become even more difficult for the industry to find a rational solution.

I welcome the Bill’s aspirations. It could do a lot more, particularly in widening the power and knowledge of individual savers who need to put more into their pensions. I look forward to following up some of these issues in Committee and on Report.

Pension Schemes Bill [HL]

Lord Stoneham of Droxford Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 21st November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to support the arguments that have just been expressed so well by my noble friend. In doing so, I declare an interest as a trustee and chairman of the members’ committee of NOW: Pensions, which has 1 million members and 20,000 employers signed up. The whole area of member engagement and communications is a major preoccupation for us in a period of what has been very rapid growth—not just of NOW: Pensions but of certain other master trusts.

To find the right way to communicate with 1 million people is an extremely tricky task, but we note with some interest that a range of solutions are now being developed. For example, we note that Legal & General, which I think has about 500,000 people in its trust-based schemes, does hold annual meetings, as the amendment calls for, while others who find that concept difficult are beginning to look more seriously at what they can do in that area.

Finding ways to encourage the member voice is pretty close to the top of most of our agendas. Putting communications at the heart of a master trust, which is by definition a rather sprawling outfit, is very important to try to get it to centre stage. The Government’s idea of a dashboard would help. I hope that is not being put on the back burner, because it would be a very useful tool to show people where they are with their pension investments and entitlements. Trustees themselves need to work very hard to explain basic messages about pensions to the people who have signed up. A pension pot, for example, is the members’ money now—it is theirs. If that penny really dropped, a lot of people would take rather more interest in the process rather than simply pushing it to one side as they often do.

Getting members to see how their workplace pension sits alongside the new state pension is also important. Members need a wider view than just the workplace scheme to get a picture of their total position when they are coming up to retirement. Where schemes offer a choice of contribution rates, as some do, drawing the availability of higher contribution tiers—and associated higher employer contributions— to members’ attention would help to make them aware that these higher contributions in fact mean a greater amount of money from the employer contribution. These kinds of points are in the spirit of helping people to maximise their interest and entitlement in the pensions area. Members should be encouraged to set themselves targets, take ownership of their pot and see if they are getting a good return when they try to work out their pension arrangements for the future.

I accept that these ideas will never be legal requirements—nor should they be; they are more good practice—but they are in the spirit in which every master trust worth its salt should be acting, and they put the members of the trust more at the core of its work. A master trust needs a very good communications strategy. I support all the things that my noble friend Lord McKenzie mentioned, such as online technology and forums. We at NOW: Pensions conduct regional meetings of employers at the moment and are thinking of extending it to members, probably on a first-come, first-served basis as we are not inclined to try to hire Wembley Stadium to run the meetings.

In supporting my noble friend, I urge the Government to take this communications area very seriously and put it not on the edge of their requirements but in the middle, right at the core of the work that is to come.

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the opportunity to support this group of amendments. I have put my name to Amendment 10 but, having heard the speeches so far, I can see no difficulty in supporting the rest of the amendments in the group—and if they come back on Report I would be pleased to sign up to them. The arguments have been strongly made but I will make three specific points about why member engagement is really important.

The first reason is that the risk in contributory pensions is totally with the employee. They are not like direct benefit schemes, where the employer is sharing a lot of the risk; in this type of pension, employees are holding the risk and therefore their engagement and involvement with how their money is being handled is pretty important. If you are introducing a regulatory scheme at this stage, it should be a central point.

My second point is that if you are introducing a regulatory system, you do not want sole reliance on the regulator to make sure that things are running well and that members are satisfied; you want a counterweighting source of evidence and interest from members themselves to support that regulatory role. That is why this should have the attention of the Government in the Bill.

The third reason is that, as we have already heard, organisations such as Legal & General are already doing that. If that is good practice, the Government should take the opportunity of the Bill to encourage it, take it forward and make it more widespread. The concept of an annual meeting, which Legal & General already accepts as a valuable new forum for communication with members, should be examined and included as an option in the legislation. That would be a way to introduce the discipline of finding out what members want and to make it the fiduciary duty of the trustees to understand what members want from their pension investment. For all those reasons, the Government must take this very seriously. I hope that they will look at this more closely so that when we get to Report, there will be no need to retable the amendments.

[Baroness Altmann]

First, I support my noble friend’s remarks about the master trust assurance framework under the previous amendment, because that framework already exists and there are a number of shortcomings in it, so I could not support including it in the Bill’s requirements.

However, in these amendments we are dealing with member engagement—and, indeed, employer engagement, because with a master trust, the employer has in a number of ways handed over responsibility to the trustees. Many of the smallest employers who are currently joining auto-enrolment and using master trust schemes are not fully aware of all the implications and intricacies of pension arrangements. Therefore, it is important to have member engagement and information requirements as part of an authorisation process.

In particular, this might help to address one of the big injustices that your Lordships’ House has not yet addressed. Members who earn less than £11,000 a year who join a pension scheme—in particular, a master trust—which happens to use a net pay arrangement, are charged about 25% more for their pension than they would be if their master trust used a different scheme. I have to mention that that is apart from the NOW: Pensions master trust, which has itself made up the extra money that those low earners are unable to receive from tax relief they are due because of the administration of their scheme.

If there were proper member engagement and information that told both members and employers that this particular complicated administration arrangement denies low earners a significant amount of money, perhaps the operation of the schemes would work better in members’ interests and the employers themselves would be better informed.