Savings (Government Contributions) Bill (First sitting)

Maria Caulfield Excerpts

Tuesday 25th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Peter Dowd]

Q In the information you provided, you say:

“There are concerns that savers may end up with the wrong investments leading to the wrong outcomes as a result of the route through which they enter the market rather than as a result of a conscious investment decision.”

Again, it is important to try to unwrap that. Could you unwrap it a little more for us, please?

David Wren: Absolutely. There were some questions in the previous session about the risks in a lifetime ISA. Ultimately, the lifetime ISA is a wrapper around some assets, and the assets are for you to decide. There will be people who offer only cash lifetime ISAs; they do not offer stocks and shares to any customers, and they will not be offering it for this. There will, presumably, be people who offer only stocks and shares lifetime ISAs. The fact that you have picked up the phone to someone who offers only one particular product may not mean that that is the best product for you. There will hopefully be information out there, and we very much hope the Government will work with us to provide good information to customers on getting the right product.

To answer Tom’s point, to have cash sitting somewhere for 20 years is probably a bad idea, particularly with interest rates as they are at the moment. Similarly, going into stocks and shares for three years is a bad idea—there were questions earlier about the risks that people were exposing themselves to. Helping people get the right access to the right product at the right time is going to be a critical part of making sure that the lifetime ISA is successful.

[Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)]

Q Tom, I want to go back to your point that this would make the market too complicated and crowded in terms of what products are available. Is it not true that for a long time, many people have been left out of savings altogether—I am particularly thinking of people on low incomes, the self-employed and those with multiple, low-paid occupations? Actually, there is a lack of culture around savings; it is just not the norm for some people. While the auto-enrolment pension will go some way to addressing the pensions issue, as we heard in the previous session, this is in addition to, not instead of, auto-enrolment. Is it not that the product is right, but the key is getting that advice available to people so they can make that decision? This will open up the market to people for whom savings have not been an option before.

Tom McPhail: Given where we are now, six months before the intended launch, our starting point would be to go ahead with this. However, in the longer term we are still of the opinion that it is not going to achieve those aims you have just described.

We also looked at the 2017 auto-enrolment review as an opportunity to adjust some of the thresholds to recognise the changes that have come about as a result of the pensions freedoms and the importance of giving more people more access to retirement savings, to bring some of the lower paid into the pensions system. We have looked at ways to revisit those questions that were not answered around pension tax reliefs and ways to reward people for saving for retirement, but the lifetime ISA is not going to achieve that.

You heard some numbers about the self-employed. Actually, two thirds of the self-employed are already ineligible for the lifetime ISA. So we have a situation where the one group of the population that, more than any other, sets to benefit from the lifetime ISA is ineligible for it. In what way is this a good policy?

You are right about the low-paid: we need to do more for them. We think there are ways we can do that through the pensions system. I am sure you will hear later about Help to Save, which is not an area I want to comment on, but there are other ways to address that. The lifetime ISA is not going to fix those problems.

[Maria Caulfield]

Q You say that in the short term it might work, but in the long term it is not going to help. Why is that?

Tom McPhail: Just because we keep moving the goalposts. It was really interesting doing some consumer focus groups around the pension freedoms. When we talked to people about all the risks around pension freedoms, we thought they would say they were worried about running out of money or not knowing where to invest, but pretty much everybody we spoke to said that their main worry was that the politicians would move the goalposts again, that they would change the rules again. It happens particularly with pensions, but it happens elsewhere as well. Every time this happens, it undermines people’s confidence and trust in the system.

The recent decision around the secondary annuity market was interesting. We think that was a good decision. We are actually quite glad that the Government made the decision to pull back from the secondary annuity market, but what did we see then? We saw headlines in the Daily Mail saying, “People have been denied pension freedoms—once more the opportunity has been snatched away from them”. Every time we do this, it chips away at people’s confidence. We need to think about how and when we make these decisions and these changes. Our preferred option would be to go ahead with the lifetime ISA, because this is where we are at now, but in the longer term to move towards consolidating all these different ISAs we have been hearing about into one simple super ISA and, separately, to go back and address the questions around pension taxation that we failed to deal with last time around.

[Maria Caulfield]

Q To push you a bit further on that, a lot of people only have a pension thanks to auto-enrolment. Do you not agree that anything that gets people saving and that encourages them into a culture of saving, whether it be for their first home or for later in life, is a good thing?

Tom McPhail: But it is not a zero-sum. We could give people a 100% top-up on their money, but we cannot afford to do that, so we have to make choices about how we go about doing things.

[Maria Caulfield]

Q Is it not better that they have a savings scheme rather than not save at all?

Tom McPhail: We need to get them into the auto-enrolment system. That is the way to help them save for the longer term. If we want to address their short-term savings, there are other ways to do that.

[Dr Whiteford]

Q I can see why lifetime ISAs are a very attractive savings option for the very wealthy, high-earning young people, and those who have maxed out their pensions allowance, but to my mind, the real challenge has been encouraging people on low and middle incomes to save for retirement purposes. From what I have heard in evidence so far, you seem to agree that auto-enrolment is an important step forward. Reflecting back on the questions I asked the earlier panel, would you agree that most people on low and middle incomes would be better advised to invest in pension schemes?

Tom McPhail: The numbers overwhelmingly point to the fact that, if you have any kind of employer contribution, you are almost invariably better off going through the auto-enrolment system at work and saving in a pension than going into a lifetime ISA. Separately, we think that there is more we can do with the incentives to save in a pension that would improve that equation even further. Yes, absolutely, for most people most of the time, for long-term savings, the pension should be, and is, a better answer.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Cartlidge]

Q I want to carry on with this point about complexity, because it seems to me that you are using the word “complexity” where others might use the word “flexibility”, dare I say. As we discussed with the previous witnesses, it is surely not unreasonable for a young family to be entirely focused on buying property, particularly if they live in areas that are very expensive. Perhaps they are on a short-hold tenancy with less security, and so on. Therefore, when presented with a savings option, they will want to opt for a deposit.

I take your point about help to buy ISAs, but they are going in two years, we understand. Do you accept that the flexibility that comes from a pseudo-pension product that could be used for a mid-life event—in other words, buying a house—is what makes LISAs unique, unlike auto-enrolment? There is a big market for this, and there are a lot of people who would welcome that choice.

Tom McPhail: We think there are other and better ways of addressing that problem that would be simpler and more sympathetic to investors’ needs. We support the auto-enrolment agenda, and we think it is important to get as many of the people you have just talked about as possible into an arrangement where they are saving for their retirement. Some of them may choose to opt out of a pension and eschew the benefit of an employer contribution, and to save into an ISA instead. For some, that might be a logical, rational and appropriate decision to make. That would, of course, mean that they were not saving for retirement in the most tax-efficient way available to them. In fact, potentially, they would not be saving for retirement at all, if they had opted out of a pension to achieve that goal.

One of the risks is that the lifetime ISA will subvert the pension-saving agenda. It is critical that pension providers and human resources managers—anyone involved in pensions—are communicating effectively around those trade-offs, the risks of giving up the benefits of the employer contribution, and the long-term consequences of that.

The help to buy product gave people taxpayer support in buying a house. There was actually relatively little wrong with it. It was there as a vehicle for saving in the short term, to build up a cash pot specifically to buy a house. The idea of trying to have your cake and eat it—of trying to save up for a house and for retirement within one product—that is where the complexity comes from, and that is where you are trying to do two things with one bag of money. If you use it to buy your house, it is not a savings product anymore.

We have already talked about eligibility for the lifetime ISA, and the fact that most self-employed people—for whom this could be a really good idea—are not eligible because of the age restriction. So I agree with you, but I am not sure that we are going about this in the best way.

David Wren: We really like the help to buy ISA; it is clear and unambiguous. Are you saving for a house? Are you a first-time buyer? Put money in. It is cash, and there is no confusion about whether you are also saving for your pension at the same time, because that is not a feature of the product. It is a really nice, neat product, which says, “Here’s what I do; here’s how I help you; and the Government will provide you with some help to buy your first house.” It is a shame that it will be removed in 2019. It has been very successful, and something like 250,000 were opened in the first six months of the product. That kind of really clear labelling and signposting that others have talked about is something that help to buy really had, and that the lifetime ISA risks not having.

[Maria Caulfield]

Q From an industry point of view, which product would make you most money from selling it, a lifetime ISA or a pension scheme?

Tom McPhail: We make the same money on all of them.

[Maria Caulfield]

Even a lifetime ISA?

Tom McPhail: Correct. We have the same platform charge, irrespective of the arrangements you are going into. Where we lose money, or where we potentially end up having to charge the customer more money, is when things get complicated. The more complicated it is, the more it costs us money, and the more, potentially, we have to pass on to the customer in costs, but we will make no more money on any of these products.

David Wren: As a trade body, I do not think that we have access to that kind of information.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

Q I have listened to you both with interest. I have to say that this scheme will do nothing for a high proportion of our population who are less well off and less sophisticated. Again, all these schemes seem to be designed for the better-off and the more articulate. I have had to ask to have my life insurance schemes explained to me two or three times, but I have not got a clue what those who explained it were talking about—and I am a graduate in economics and mathematics. Half the population are not numerate, and a fifth of the population are not functionally literate. We need a state automatic scheme to help people like that, going beyond auto-enrolment—a defined-benefit scheme, and that can only be done in the state sector.