Pension Schemes Bill (Second sitting) Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Work and Pensions
Mark Garnier
Main Page: Mark Garnier (Conservative - Wyre Forest)Department Debates - View all Mark Garnier's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
Tuesday 2nd September 2025
(2 days ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Pension Schemes Bill 2024-26 View all Pension Schemes Bill 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 2 September 2025 - (2 Sep 2025)
The Chair
I remind Members that questions are not limited to what is in the brief, but your questions must be within the scope of the Bill. In line with this morning’s session, for each panel of witnesses I propose to call the shadow Minister first, then the Minister and then the Liberal Democrat spokesperson. I will then go back and forth between the Government and Opposition Benches; anyone who wants to ask a question should catch my eye.
We must stick to the cut-off times specified in the programme motion, so I will have to interrupt questioners if necessary. I remind Members that they must declare any relevant interest both when speaking in Committee and when tabling amendments to the Bill. If there are no further questions, I will call the next set of witnesses.
We will now hear oral evidence from Councillor Roger Phillips, chair of the Local Government Pension Scheme Advisory Board, and Robert McInroy, head of LGPS client consulting at Hymans. We have until 2.30 pm for this panel. Will the witnesses please introduce themselves for the record?
Councillor Phillips: Good afternoon. I am Councillor Roger Phillips. I chair the Local Government Pension Scheme Advisory Board and have done so for the last 10 years. Prior to that, I was on the working party that reformed the pension scheme from final salary to career average.
Robert McInroy: Thanks for inviting me. My name is Robert McInroy and I am the head of LGPS consulting at Hymans Robertson. We provide actuarial, investment and governance services to around 75% of LGPS funds, and it is pleasing to say that we have had some of those partnerships for many decades. In fact, Hymans Robertson was created over 100 years ago to provide services to the LGPS and local government.
Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)
Q
Councillor Phillips: I think there is general concern within the sector when language like that is used, because we are talking about a considerable sum of money that belongs to 6.7 million pensioners. You therefore have to treat that with utter respect. You have a fiduciary duty to look after that money and ensure that the investment is wisely made. The fiduciary duty of the funds and pools is there—the funds own the pools—so there will be concern if somebody wants to politicise it. That is a very dangerous road to go down.
When it comes to UK investment, the LGPS is already investing in the UK in a very big way. This is not a case where you use a stick and say, “You’ve got to invest in the United Kingdom.” It is about identifying risk, return and sometimes conflicts of interest. Certainly we should be investing where it is sensible to do so for the benefit of our pensioners and for the least obligation to our employers as well. That should be clearly understood by everyone.
Mark Garnier
Q
Councillor Phillips: Local investment is difficult because, again, I go back to this business of it being our duty to invest wisely, prudently and sensibly. That is important. With local investment, first of all, it depends on your definition of “local”, particularly given the current pooling arrangements. You could have a strategic mayoral authority that has three different pools, because the pools come from all over the geography of England and Wales, so that is a difficulty.
Secondly, it is about return and making sure the pipeline of potential projects is there and that those projects are investable. If LGPS is going to invest in them, surely the rest of the investment industry will also want to invest in them, including the Canadian people.
The other thing I would say, which I surely do not have to tell you as Members of Parliament, is that some local matters are controversial. You may think that a particular local investment is what an area needs, but actually a large part of your people do not. You have to show a little bit of discretion. You may invest in offshore wind, which is very popular, but getting the link to the grid, going across open countryside with massive pylons, is not popular. The LGPS will have to bear that in mind, because sometimes the members, the constituent authorities and the council tax payers will not appreciate it.
Mark Garnier
Q
Councillor Phillips: We go back to the importance of fiduciary duty. You are there to invest for the benefit of your pensioners and to make sure that you do that in a sensible and reliable way. As has been proved to date, the most popular element is probably affordable housing. Cornwall, which you mentioned, has invested very wisely in affordable housing. Together with its relationship with local government as the owners of much land, there is huge potential there, but it only comes right when the return is there. If the return is not there, you are not going to enter into it.
Mark Garnier
Q
Councillor Phillips: If you do not do that, I do not know where you are going with your pension investment.
Mark Garnier
Q
Councillor Phillips: We anticipate that the latest round of valuations will show a very good surplus for all the pensions. That is credit to the investments that have been made to date. That does pose some issues as to what you do with those surpluses, but we live in a very volatile situation, and circumstances can change. You have to be careful, because if you reduce contribution rates considerably, that is a great benefit at this moment in time, but if you then turn around and start to increase them again, that can be very difficult for all employers to deal with, including local government.
Mark Garnier
Q
Robert McInroy: Yes, on the last point about surpluses. I am a fund actuary. We are working through the 2025 valuations, and it is pleasing to see improvements in funding levels across the LGPS. We think that that, in turn, can mean lower contribution rates, particularly for councils—something in the region of 3% to 6% of pay, so that is positive. It is important to realise that the success of the current scheme has perhaps not been picked up in some of the language and assumptions built into the reforms that have been put forward.
Mark Garnier
Q
Robert McInroy: That has been discussed on a fund-by-fund basis—whether the funding target should be increased from something like 100% to 120%, for example. That has been actively discussed.
Mark Garnier
Q
Robert McInroy: I support looking at the range of options, which includes reducing employer contributions and flexing investment strategy, including for some of the areas that we have talked about and will be talking about, that could be available to the LGPS in terms of investments.
Luke Murphy (Basingstoke) (Lab)
Q
Councillor Phillips: Like the local government sector, the local government pension scheme operates in a goldfish bowl: constantly, on a weekly basis, an article is written about you or you receive a freedom of information request. So you are very conscious of the scrutiny, and that helps direct you to manage the investment risks as part of your fiduciary duties. What people do not realise is that there will be particular packages that Government and strategic mayors may think a fine investment that they should be in, but there might be some local problems. To go back to the previous question, it might be better for Northumberland to invest in it rather than Cornwall. That sensitivity has to be there.
The Chair
The Committee will now hear oral evidence from Helen Forrest Hall, chief strategy officer at the Pensions Management Institute, and Sophia Singleton, president of the Society of Pension Professionals. We have until 3 pm for this panel. Could the witnesses briefly introduce themselves?
Helen Forrest Hall: I am Helen Forrest Hall, chief strategy officer at the Pensions Management Institute. We are the leading professional body for those running pension schemes in the UK. We provide qualifications and training to the sector, as well as continued professional development, and have almost 8,000 individual members.
Sophia Singleton: I am Sophia Singleton, president of the Society of Pension Professionals, and in my day job I am a partner at XPS Group. The society represents providers of advice and services to pension schemes and employers. As such, we represent quite a broad range of the industry, from pensions lawyers and actuaries through to professional trustees, pension providers and administrators.
Mark Garnier
Q
Helen Forrest Hall: I would love to say that. I start by saying that the PMI supports the principle that larger pension funds are likely to lead to better outcomes for members. A great and growing weight of evidence, and obviously an awful lot of international experience, shows that they provide greater economies of scale and greater opportunities to invest in a broader range of assets. Unfortunately, we believe that the reserve power sets a dangerous precedent of political interference with a trustee’s fiduciary duty. The considerations of each individual pension scheme are a matter for the trustees, taking into account their members’ experience and what will drive the best outcomes for those members.
Obviously, significant progress has already been made in terms of pension schemes demonstrating their desire to meet the Government’s eagerness for them to invest in a broader range of assets, and the consolidation elements of the Bill should help with that. But I think that the reserve power provision runs a serious risk of cutting across that well-founded fiduciary duty, as well as creating all sorts of disruption to long-term investment planning—another thing that pension schemes are well set up to do—and creating market distortion.
Sophia Singleton: We are very much aligned with the Government’s objective around investing in these assets. We believe that they can deliver and, as Helen has said, the industry has already made quite a strong move towards investing in them. We are going to get there, and it is really about not forcing that to happen too quickly. Schemes need to deploy capital when the opportunities arise and when the right time is, otherwise we risk distorting the market. That is a real concern, because it could deliver poor outcomes for savers. I am sorry we cannot give you a different answer, but we have three concerns about the mandation. Who is legally accountable if there is underperformance? Underperformance is possible. Is it the Government? Is it trustees? How will it affect the markets? How will it affect public trust? At a time when people need to save more into their pensions, they will worry that their pension scheme is no longer investing for returns as a priority.
Mark Garnier
Q
Helen Forrest Hall: That is the problem with a reserve power. It does not have to be used to influence the decisions that trustees are making about their investment strategies, because they have to consider the instances—and there is not an awful lot of clarity in the Bill about what those instances would be—in which this power might be used. They might suddenly find their long-term, well-considered investment strategy outwith Government legislation. That is a dangerous place to be. Pension schemes, quite rightly, are doing their job when they are thinking about their members and their beneficiaries, and making long-term investment decisions. They have the capacity and the joy of being able to do so, but that means that they have to think about those kind of time horizons. That means that a reserve power with a sunset clause with that kind of short-term time horizon will start impacting decisions that people are making at the moment.
Mark Garnier
Q
Helen Forrest Hall: I am not sure that we would draw a direct correlation, but the point is that it will start to influence investment decisions. Those may be good decisions, or not, and they may be decisions that trustees would have made anyway; the challenge is that the reserve power exists, a good trustee and their legal advisers will be taking account of that at the moment.
Sophia Singleton: We believe that the threat—just the threat—of this power is the worst of all worlds, in a sense, because the lack of clarity about what trustees should do and take into account when investing for the long term makes it very difficult for them to carry out their fiduciary duties.
Mark Garnier
Q
Sophia Singleton: What I would say is that we are already moving in that direction. If you look back a few years ago, it was very difficult operationally for defined contribution schemes to invest in those types of assets. If you look at things now, both on the supply side and the demand side we see factors that are really supporting investment in those assets.
On the demand side, the new value for money framework really incentivised investment into private market assets because of the risk-adjusted metrics included within the framework, and the work that the industry and regulators have done to take away the operational barriers that existed. On the supply side, the Government have committed to help to create that pipeline of investments. Publishing the pipeline that is coming up is very helpful, because people can plan how to employ their capital, and having the British Growth Fund and so on to invest in alongside the private sector is also helpful.
We are already seeing it happen: we are seeing funds recruiting investment experts to help to manage those assets, so they are already gearing up and skilling up to do this, and we are seeing fund managers releasing private market funds suitable for DC schemes on a regular basis. We do due diligence on those funds, and there are more and more that we have to look at. So it is happening.
Mark Garnier
Q
That begs the question that, as the Government at any time is trying to attract foreign direct investment into the UK, not least to try to sort out the current account deficit, you as pension fund managers will find yourselves in competition with, hopefully, foreign investors coming into the UK. What is the hierarchy of offer? Do you think UK pension funds should be offered exciting investment opportunities before foreign direct investors?
Sophia Singleton: I do not think we should be interfering with the market; I think it needs to be a free market and, as trustees of pension schemes, we need to be exercising fiduciary duty to choose the right investments for our members and to give the returns.
Mark Garnier
But you would rather see the opportunities first?
Sophia Singleton: Absolutely—we would love to see the opportunities first.
Helen Forrest Hall: The other dynamic there is that international pension funds, for example, are often looking to invest in the UK for reasons different from the reasons UK pension funds might want to invest. For them, it is often a smaller part of their portfolio, and part of their own need to diversify where their assets are, in order to manage their own volatility risks. There has been a history of going after the same investments, and unfortunately that is the market and that is healthy competition. One of the challenges and one of the market distortions we see with things such as the reserve power is that you will have the same group of people fighting over what, for a short period of time, is inevitably going to be a short pipeline. That will have an impact on things such as the value for money that you are getting for those investments.
Torsten Bell
Q
Given that that is your logic, the question is why that has not happened. If you go and ask actual pension providers why that has not happened, they will tell you they have a collective action problem and an industry focused exclusively on cost and not on returns, and that they struggle to deliver against that. If you have a collective action problem, you need to ask how we resolve that.
You then get to the fact that the Mansion House accord is entirely industry led, with numbers set by them—it is not about distortion to the market; you might want to reflect on that, given the comments you have just made. You also spoke about a lack of clarity, but the Mansion House accord provides clarity about the objectives: everyone can see them and they are set by the industry. When it comes to savers’ interests, you know that the Bill includes a carve-out for trustees to say, “This isn’t in my members’ interests, so we won’t be doing it.” Reflect a bit on the consistency of the argument you have made about the real progress you want to see on investment in a wider range of assets—because it is in savers’ interests and should have happened in the past but did not—and the changes in the Bill. I would gently suggest you might want to think about the consistency of that.
Sophia Singleton: We are not a mature industry—the defined contribution industry—and in the past we have not invested in these assets because there have been operational barriers, including the focus on cost.
The Chair
We will now hear oral evidence from Patrick Heath-Lay, chief executive officer of People’s Partnership, and Ian Cornelius, CEO of NEST Corporation. We have until 3.30 pm for this panel. Will the witnesses please briefly introduce themselves for the record?
Patrick Heath-Lay: Good afternoon. My name is Patrick Heath-Lay. I am the CEO of People’s Partnership, a large DC master trust with £35 billion of assets under management and about 7 million members. Importantly, we are a not-for-profit organisation. Within that, we are an asset owner, not an investment manager, so our asset ownership activities are solely for the benefit of members and not commercially for ourselves.
Ian Cornelius: I am Ian Cornelius. I have been the CEO of NEST since May last year. I will say a few words about NEST. It was set up by the Government at the inception of auto-enrolment to make sure that every individual has access to a good-quality pension. It has been a great success story. It now looks after over 13 million members, which is a third of the working population, and manages over £53 billion of assets on their behalf. We receive about half a billion pounds of assets every month.
The focus of NEST has been, and will continue to be, on low to moderate earners, so the typical NEST member earns just under £25,000. In many ways, NEST is probably one of the best examples of the sort of megafund that the Bill is looking to create. It has been able to invest in private assets, invest in the UK and deliver good outcomes for members.
Mark Garnier
Q
Ian Cornelius: I do not think that the Bill particularly focuses on that problem, but the question is whether it is a problem. The pensions dashboard will help to provide more visibility of where people’s money is and help them to manage that more effectively. I think it is right to focus on small pots, because they are inefficient. It is much harder for consumers to track lots of small pots, and it is driving costs in the industry, so I think that that is the right initial focus.
Mark Garnier
Q
Ian Cornelius: Customers—members—can already do that if they choose to.
Mark Garnier
Q
Ian Cornelius: I think that is right. It probably goes back to dashboards. They are key to helping to increase visibility. That will get people thinking about the choices they can make, how they want to manage their pension and how they can consolidate their pensions. That will drive that type of activity naturally. At NEST, we have always had one pot per member to make it as easy as possible for our members. Ultimately, it is about member choice.
Mark Garnier
Q
Patrick, could I turn to you? We met and had a very interesting chat. One thing we discussed was the scale of the funds. There is a requirement in the Bill that funds such as yours will need to be valued at £25 billion by 2035. One thing we discussed at the time was whether that creates a barrier to entry for new asset managers, and a lack of competition among asset managers in order to provide the best value for those funds. Would you share some of your thoughts about the £25 billion minimum size?
Patrick Heath-Lay: Yes, of course. We have conducted research. Toby Nangle did some research for us in 2025, and WPI Economics has also looked at the issue of whether scale drives better economies. Generally, aside from all the international comparisons from Canada and Australia, it is proven that scale will drive better economies. You can leverage scale to drive a more efficient administration. If you are asset owners like these two organisations, we get to choose where we invest the money, which managers we use, who will come with the best solutions and who has the best routes and access to market to allow us to invest in a way that benefits and shares the benefit of that investment with the end saver, which for us as an organisation is the sole focus.
I believe that scale, utilised in the right way, does deliver those efficiencies, but this is where the package in the Bill, and particularly a key element like value for money, is critical to establishing that as this market evolves. You want to be reassured that the investment activity at that scale is delivering increasing value for members, which is really the sole purpose of driving that scale. From our own experience and the research that we have done, it is a proven model, but that scale needs to be harnessed in the right way.
Mark Garnier
Q
Patrick Heath-Lay: I do not want to be flippant in my response, but our scale already means that we are over that limit, so I have not really put too much thought into how they will do it. I believe that there is enough, within the business plans of entities that might be affected, to be able to make some reasonable assumptions as to what ongoing contributions will be coming through the door and how they will respond to some of the opportunities that may arise in this market over the next few years, from organisations that are choosing to move because of the extent of change that is coming.
I emphasise that I still think that the package of measures and that scale test is the right thing to instil that movement, because I think savers will be better off, provided that it is harnessed in the right way. That is why I come back to this: value for money is the proof point, and we need to make sure that we centre on that as an industry. Being able to evaluate how these changes have created a more competitive market in key areas going forward is really quite important.
Torsten Bell
Q
Ian Cornelius: It is one of the elements of the Bill that we very much welcome. I think guided retirement solutions are overdue. Certainly, our members have been opted into a retirement savings scheme, and they end up with a pot of money rather than an income. I think their expectation is an income. In fact, in the research we have done with our members, they say that the most important things for them are to have a sustainable income, confidence that it will not run out and an element of flexibility, because their circumstances can change very quickly in retirement. I think the guided retirement solution moves us in that direction.
At NEST, we have been working on this for some time, as we recognise that it is a core issue for our members. We therefore want to introduce a guided retirement solution—it is very much a work in progress—that delivers that sustainable income, but also gives them a guarantee that it will not run out. That will be some sort of deferred annuity, purchased probably when they are 75, to kick in when they are 85. We are actively working on that and will be looking to introduce it in 2027, aligning with the expectation in the Bill.
Patrick Heath-Lay: It is very similar from our perspective. We should not underestimate how much onus the shift from final salary to DC has put on individual savers, in terms of the decision that they have to make, in a very complex world that they really do not understand. Even if you surface a lot of information, your constituents will still struggle to navigate those decision points. We also should not underestimate the onus they have taken on, in terms of the risk of their own fund, when you think about the productive finance agenda and other things here. I think it is absolutely the right move. It is a good development for us to bring about guided retirement journeys in a way that is either “Do it for me” or “Do it with me” for policyholders.
Similarly, we are thinking about drawdown and how we can facilitate or help people to understand the implications of the actions they may take with accessing their funds, and then, when they get to later life, some sort of deferred annuity as an approach. The really important aspect is the guidance and how we can help, but have certain obligations on ourselves, as providers, to make sure that we are accountable for the help that we are giving as we go through the process.
Mark Garnier
Q
Tim Fassam: The short answer is yes, we are big fans of the value for money framework, but it is worth thinking about why that is. When we are looking at why we have not had the investment that we would necessarily expect, and that we see in other similar countries—so, exposure to private markets and exposure to productive assets—we think there are roughly three groups of reasons. Some are cultural and have been helped by things such as the accord and the compact. Some are regulatory, and that will be a major topic of conversation in this Committee. But some are market, and the market challenges are really around who is the buyer of automatic enrolment pensions. That is usually the employer.
Historically, we have seen most employers focus on the charge, and the charge alone. That means we are now seeing charges well below the price charge cap for automatic enrolment, which is a good thing for consumers, but it is at such a low level that it is very hard to offer more enhanced investment solutions, so that means they tend to be invested in more passive investments and trackers. The value for money framework is important because it should have an impact on those purchasers, making it easier for them to see a more holistic view of the value that they are getting from the pension that is being offered to them, in terms of investment, service and a wider range of metrics. We are not sure it is perfect, as currently developed, but it is certainly in the right direction.
Mark Garnier
Q
Where I begin to get slightly confused is that it then switches to member satisfaction surveys. I am curious as to what the member is. You raised the very good point that the customer is the business, but that is not the same as the member. Who is being asked whether they are investing in the right assets? That is quite a technical question by the time you start looking all of this. Can you see that there are anomalies and Gordian knots within this?
Tim Fassam: There is certainly a lot of detail to be worked through. That will include understanding the impact of all these factors. For example, investment return will be an incredibly important part of the value-for-money framework. It is very hard to do forward-looking investment return analysis, but if you do backward-looking, you cement the best of what we have today. The premise of the Bill is that we want to see a different investment pattern going forward. It will be very hard to, say, model a higher allocation to private markets in a forward-looking metric unless we have some creative thinking. Getting those investment metrics right is absolutely critical.
Service does matter to customers in terms of how easy it is to deal with and how much support they are getting to make good investment decisions. That will have a significant impact. When you combine it with things like the potential for targeted support, that could make a very significant difference in terms of the outcomes that the consumers get. We always think of the end customer being the individual. We have a close and important working relationship with the employer, and they are often working with employee benefit consultants to choose their scheme, but the most important stakeholder in all of this is the end user. We want them to get the best possible result to help them prepare for retirement.
Mark Garnier
Q
Tim Fassam: We are certainly concerned about the intermediate rating and the risk that that could cause a cliff edge if it means that, to get an intermediate rating, you are effectively closed for new business and potentially existing new joiners for a new firm. We think an intermediate rating that aligns with delivering value, but with a warning light that gives the firm a couple of years to get back into high value for money, will stop the perverse consequences. What I mean by perverse consequences is that if the cost of underperformance is significantly higher than the benefit of outperformance, you will see everyone herding in the middle. That will mean that you may well get a better outcome than today, but you will not get the competitive pressure to be the best of the best, which I think will see the better outcome in the longer term.
Mark Garnier
Q
Tim Fassam: Your value for money rating will be published.
Mark Garnier
Q
Tim Fassam: If you see very strong market or regulatory consequences for hitting an intermediate rating, the focus will be on not being intermediate rather than on being the best that you can be. We would like to see a focus on delivering the best value for money that you can.
Luke Murphy
Q
Tim Fassam: That is a very good question. One of the things that makes the Bill powerful but more complex is the number of elements that interact. Eventually, we hope, it makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts, but it does mean it is critical that you get the ordering right. For example, we need the value for money framework and transfer without consent as soon as possible, so that we are able to get in good shape for the 2030 scale test—so those deadlines brought forward. Small pots are part of that scale: we are seeing thousands of new small pots generated every year, so the quicker we can get on with managing small pots, the fewer of them there will be for us to manage going forward.
It is critical to think very carefully about the staging and phasing of the various elements of the Bill. That is the point we are trying to make. On the elements that help the market get to where we hope to get to by 2030, we need to get in as swiftly as possible, with enough time after the detail is in place for the industry to implement. I appreciate it looks like we are asking for things to be slowed down and sped up, but it is just making sure the ordering is correct and we have enough time to get into good shape for that 2030 deadline.
We think the scope should be extended partly because of how supportive we are of the measures. Being a historical consolidator of private pensions, we have millions of customers who are not workplace customers but who could benefit from being transferred into a more modern, larger scale scheme and from going into a consolidator of small pots, for example. We see that value in our own book. We look at the opportunity and think, “We wish we could do that for this group of customers. They would really benefit.”
The pensions market is quite complex, as others have pointed out. It is contract-based and trust-based. You also have workplace and private pensions. The more consistent we can be across all the different types of customer, who often do not think of themselves as being any different from each other, the more coherent a scheme we are likely to get at the end result.
Mark Garnier
Q
Morten Nilsson: I see it as a good thing. I think it will change the pension industry quite a bit as a positive innovation. Closed DB schemes, which we focus on, might be seen more as an asset for sponsors, rather than a liability that they would like to get rid of as quickly as possible. I think that it will create quite a lot of innovation, and a lot of good things will come out of that.
Mark Garnier
Q
Morten Nilsson: I see it pretty much as you described. The main duty of the sponsors and the trustees is to ensure that there is enough money in the scheme to pay the benefits that were promised to members. If there are excess funds, it is reasonable that they can be invested back into the economy. In May, we surveyed 100 finance directors who are responsible for schemes with over £500 million of assets: 93% of them said that they would want to access the surplus, 49% said they would reinvest it in their local business, in the UK, to create jobs and do other good things, 44% said they would consider sharing it with members, 42% said they would invest it in their global operations, 40% said they would pay it back to shareholders, and 33% would invest it in DC. That is quite a wide range of uses. I think some of it will be paid back to shareholders, which may be local or abroad, but I expect a lot of it would be invested back into the UK economy in one way or another.
Mark Garnier
Q
Michelle Ostermann: Obviously, just as you describe, because we backstop the entire industry, what we are watching most closely is the fundedness of schemes, combined with the credit quality or the covenant, and the financial stability of the organisation itself. Those two combined are what help us to assess industry-wide risk and determine how much reserve we need to set aside for future claims on the PPF.
There is a spectrum of schemes out there, clearly—some that are very well funded, which you have been speaking of, and several that are not as well funded. On that spectrum, our focus is on the left side tail—the ones that are most underfunded, or nearing the potential to be underfunded. Given the measures that are being discussed for the release of surplus, we at the PPF feel comfortable with it not imposing a material amount of risk to us, as it is currently defined. It seems to find a nice prudent balance between allowing some flexibility for sponsors to use that money in hopefully a productive way, combined with the test to make sure they do not fall below a certain level, which would bring risk upon the industry and the PPF. We have been a constant participant in that conversation, and we would like to suggest that we will continue to play that role as a surveyor of the net residual impact to the industry.
Mark Garnier
Q
Michelle Ostermann: Yes—it is very similar.
Mark Garnier
And you war game it?
Michelle Ostermann: Yes. The biggest variable that we have a hard time predicting in those scenarios is the likelihood of this being used and the manner in which it is used, but we test deep into the tail. We try several scenarios that give us a high probability of it being abused or overused, and the opposite, and we have come out with pretty strong confidence. As it is defined today, we feel comfortable.
Mark Garnier
Q
Michelle Ostermann: Not here in the UK, but as you can tell by my accent, I am not a local. I worked in Canada for most of my career, at two of the largest Canadian “Maple Eight” pension plans, and those are things that we would assess quite regularly. In fact, the open DB schemes here in the UK function very similarly to those in Canada. I joined the PPF in large part because it is a mini-version of the Canadian model. It is exceptionally similar, to me. You will notice that during the liquidity crisis that occurred it was the liability-driven investment strategies, with the degree of leverage, that were most at risk, and it was interest rate-sensitive. Those open DB schemes that were using a more balanced degree of risk, including some equity risk, were unencumbered. It was Railpen, which I worked for when I was here previously. I was phoning back to my peers both there and at the universities superannuation scheme and PPF, and they all withstood that very well.
Mark Garnier
Q
Michelle Ostermann: It is definitely something that was on our radar. When we build the investment strategy for an open DB scheme, such as those I described, it is quite different and less susceptible to that type of risk.
Steve Darling
Q
Michelle Ostermann: I assume you are speaking of our levy?
Mark Garnier
Q
Chris Curry: We heard a little about that from the previous witness, who I think also has first-hand experience of the Canadian investment models, but there are a number of different reasons. First, there is the aggregation in the system that was talked about; the UK has a very fragmented pensions system. There are a number of different large sectors, but each large sector is not large internationally speaking. Scheme maturity, scheme size and scale generally are a factor. Very few individual schemes have the scale and the amount of assets to invest large-scale in some of the UK opportunities in the way that Canadian schemes have invested on a large scale—as has been said. Half a billion pounds to £1 billion in a single investment is very large by UK standards, compared with the size of schemes.
There is also, because of that lack of scale, a lack of development of the expertise required by some of those specialists—sophistication has also been mentioned—across some of the different individual schemes that we have in the UK. If you are larger, you can afford to have those specialist management teams or specialists on the board. It is not such a proportionate cost as it would be to a relatively small scheme.
Cost is another factor. As we heard from previous witnesses, in the UK a lot of focus on schemes has been on the cost of providing a scheme; in the workplace especially, by default a lot of competition is based on cost. With some of the opportunities we are talking about, especially in productive finance, in the UK space, investing in the UK would come at a high cost, so there is less scope for that cost to be absorbed in an overall larger fund. A lot of the things that the Bill is trying to address are probably some of the reasons why we have not seen that UK investment up until this point.
Mark Garnier
Q
William Wright: Certainly on the derisking side, while we are blessed to have the second or third largest pool of pensions assets in the world, the structure of our pensions system—the fact that so many DB schemes have closed or are running off—means that the overall risk appetite simply is not there. There is a danger in this debate of comparing the outcomes that we see in different types of pension fund systems around the world and thinking, “We like the look of that. Can we have a bit of that, please?” I am simplifying here, but we tend not to be too keen on looking at the inputs and the decisions, often taken 20, 30 or 40 years ago in different markets around the world, that have helped to lead to the development of those systems as they are today. The Canadian public sector defined-benefit model did not happen overnight. Michelle knows the history of it better than I do, but it goes well back into the 1980s. That is why so many of the aspects of the Bill should be welcomed. They look at the fundamental drivers of what will help to define pension fund outcomes for members and the structure of our system in 10, 20 or 30 years’ time.
On how other systems think about pension systems in relation to growth and economic wellbeing in their domestic markets, one of the things that we found particularly striking is that when you compare DC pensions in the UK with DC systems in other countries, or public sector DB in the UK with public sector DB in other countries, there tends to be, for DC pensions in other countries, a higher domestic bias. There tends to be more investment, whichever way you look at it, in their domestic equity market than we see from UK DC pensions in the UK equity market. You also see, almost universally, higher levels of investment in private markets. So much of that comes back to scale. Scale is a threshold—it is not enough on its own—and then there is the sophistication, governance and skillset that needs to be built over many years on top of that.
Mark Garnier
Q
William Wright: Yes. As a number of witnesses have mentioned today, because of the structure of the UK pension fund industry, there are many different perspectives, often not entirely aligned, shall we say, with each other. Every participant in the industry has responded perfectly rationally to the incentives in front of them and the regulation behind them in their investment behaviour and risk profile. International accounting standards, rather than just UK standards, have helped to drive that in the private sector. We have seen similar derisking in other corporate DB pension systems around the world. It has been an entirely rational response. It is really interesting to see which elements of which markets around the world seem to have found a more positive response. Canadian public sector DB, the closest comparison to LGPS in this country, is one example. Others are Australian DC or some of the Nordic models—the Swedish and Danish DC models.
Mark Garnier
Q
Chris Curry: First, I agree that we have seen lots of positive response to the value for money framework. Looking across international examples—Australia, in particular—it seems as if it will be very welcome in trying to ensure that, as part of the consolidation and what is potentially coming with the next Pensions Commission, with more investment going into UK pensions, that investment is going into a place that is actually going to work on behalf of the members who are investing their money. That is really important in what we are doing. I would also echo some of the views we heard earlier that it is really important in moving away from just a cost-based analysis of pensions and into value, and in looking at the whole range of different factors that are going to determine whether you get a good outcome rather than just at how much the investment costs.
There are challenges. What we have seen in particular, which Tim mentioned earlier and echoes what we have seen in Australia, is that where you have a very hard measure over a relatively short period of time, that will affect investment behaviour. Because there is such a penalty for falling behind over a short space of time, you do everything you can to avoid falling behind, and there is fairly conclusive evidence that that has led to herding of investments in Australia. That is not to say that a framework, or even an intermediate marker, necessarily has to lead to that; I think that depends on the parameters you set and whether you are looking at the returns over one year, three years or five years, and how that works.
Ideally, recognising that pensions are a long-term investment, you would not want to be looking too much at what happens over a short period of time in investment markets; you would want to be looking over a much longer period and at how the underlying strategy is performing. That is always very difficult, and one of the challenges is trying to get the balance right between what you can measure objectively and what you can measure subjectively. Where you are looking at things like an intermediate report, you tend to be looking at something that is objective, and it is quite difficult to do that over a long period of time. There is always a balance to be struck as part of this, and it would be good to investigate that more as we get further through this process, to work out the best way of doing it in order to achieve the best outcome for members.
Mark Garnier
If I remember rightly, the Bill allows for the detail to come in afterwards, so we will have a bit of work to do when this is all over. Thank you very much.
Torsten Bell
Q
Chris Curry: I listened with interest to some of the earlier witnesses talk about dashboards, and there certainly are some lessons that we can learn from the pensions dashboards programme, as it has been evolving over the past few years, for small pots in particular.
There are two issues that I would pull out. The first is on the technology front. I think someone suggested that the next five years or so could be quite a tight timetable to build a technological solution and get it in place. You have to be very careful—you cannot underestimate just how much complexity there is and how long it takes to do these things—but I would say that the work that we have done on pensions dashboards is giving us a bit of a head start. That is not to say that we necessarily need to build on or use parts of the system that we have already built, but it has helped us understand a lot about, for example, how you can find pensions—the way you can use integrated service providers rather than having to go direct to all the schemes, and use a syndicated model to find where people might have their pensions.
It has helped the industry get a long way down the path to where it needs to be, as well. One of the big challenges for pensions dashboards is the quality of data. Enabling individuals to find their pensions means data quality: it needs not only to exist and be there; it needs to be accurate and it needs to be up to date. When you are thinking about an automatic consolidator or default consolidator for small pots, that is even more important. You are not just transferring information, but transferring money, so it is really important that the data is high quality. The work that is being done on pensions dashboards will get people in the industry a long way to having part of that in place as well.
There are definitely lessons that can be learned from how we progressed on the pensions dashboards programme. It has got us much closer to where we would be if we had had a completely blank page to start from, but there is still a reasonable amount of work to do, because it is working in a slightly different way.
The Chair
Thank you very much indeed. I will go immediately to the shadow Minister, Mark Garnier.
Mark Garnier
Q
Roger Sainsbury: In the light of Terry’s extended life history, I will just add that I am a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a former president of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
Before I come to your important question, I would like to feel sure that everybody in this room really understands the huge seriousness of the issue we are considering. This business of removing indexation from people who had pensionable service prior to 1997 has been going on for 20 years. Many of the people involved have seen the value of their payments eroded by maybe even more than 50% in that time. It is really very serious.
The second thing I would like to mention is that the scale of the problem is actually greater than the Post Office managers scandal. Of course, I am not suggesting for a moment that any of our claimants is suffering in the appalling way the postmasters did, but the numbers of our people are so huge compared with the postmasters that the actual amount of money at stake is greater. We have 140,000 PPF members who are affected by this bizarre clause of limiting the indexation, 60,000 of whom are 80 and have zero indexation, so it is a truly serious thing.
I would also like to mention one other dimension, which is timing. In our written submission to the Committee, we did not even bother to press the basic argument for why indexation should be awarded; we just focused on timing, because time is absolutely not on our side at all. Our claimants are dying, on average, at the rate of 15 a week—it is probably three while we have been holding this meeting this afternoon—or 5,500 a year. We have been told by the Department that the necessary amendment to the Pensions Act 2004 cannot be made by statutory instrument. There would have to be a new Bill and a new Act, and goodness knows how many years that might take or how many more thousands of people would have died. That is why we are pressing to get an amendment to this Bill to give a more timely answer.
Now I come to your question: what are the main arguments for and against using the reserves to benefit the members? Well, the first argument is simple, but really rather powerful: it is the only purpose that, legally, the PPF is allowed to spend its money on. The Act is very clear: unless some legal judgment was made against them, which is not on the horizon at all at the moment, the only way they are allowed to spend money is either on their own overheads or on giving benefits to members, such as the indexation that we are now talking about.
That is reason No. 1; reason No. 2, in my mind, is that expectations have not been met and promises have not been fulfilled. I go back to the Secretary of State who introduced the Second Reading debate on the 2004 Bill. He pledged that pension promises made, by the original schemes that people were in, must be met—that is, met by the PPF, which is the reason why the PPF was to be, by that Act, created. Yet that has not happened because, somehow, into schedule 7 to the Act came these dreadful words that have had the effect of not permitting the PPF to pay any indexation at all to people for time worked prior to 1997.
The third reason—ultimately, this is the important reason—is that the 140,000 people need this money. They desperately do, some of them. I mean, obviously not everybody’s condition is the same, but a lot of people will be suffering real misery and hardship. They need this money. I ask myself: “Were this Government elected on promises of governing with humanity and compassion? Are this Government going to meet that need? Or are they going to walk by on the other side?” I do not myself believe that they are; I believe that they will come up to the mark and find a way through the perceived difficulties that they have.
I think those are probably sufficient reasons to be going on with; as to the reasons against granting this, frankly, I cannot see any.
Mark Garnier
Q
Roger Sainsbury: Well, if—
Terry Monk: Can I have a go? Alan, who is sitting behind me, and all of us say that we did the right thing at the right time to secure our futures. There was no risk—we were guaranteed there was no risk. The minimum funding requirement was seriously flawed post-Maxwell. That changed it. We were told our pensions were safe. They were no longer safe—I found out to my cost, and many others did, that our pensions were not safe.
If I try to use the argument to our members that are still alive, “We can’t give you these increases because of the national accounts,” they will say, “Hang on, I did the right thing. I was told my pension was safe. I did the right thing all the way along in my life, and I saved for my future—for my comfortable retirement. I did not want to depend upon the state. I wanted to do it for myself. That is what I was proud to do.” To use the argument that the national accounts do not allow these people to get their benefits? I could not use that argument, whatever the reasons might be behind it.
Roger Sainsbury: May I try to answer your question more specifically? I think that indexation would have an impact upon Government finances. The impact would be that cash would flow into the Treasury, because if indexation is permitted and starts to be paid, there will be income tax paid on that money. The money will be going out from the private funds of the PPF, but the income tax and subsequently the VAT on expenditures will be coming into the Treasury coffers. I have yet to meet anybody, other than people in government, who can comprehend how it can be that when the PPF, from its private funds, meets an obligation, which has the incidental effect of bringing cash into the Government coffers, that can at the same time lead to a failure to meet the fiscal rules.
The fiscal rules, incidentally, are set up for a period of four years, when the unravelling of the indexation obligation will take many decades. We have been told in ministerial letters that it has been set up this way with a view to improving transparency. Well, I am sure you have all heard of the fog of war, but I think we are now up against the fog of transparency. I do not think it is real money that the Government are talking about. Even in their own letters, they say it is a statistical way of handling the figures.
The recent Government line on this is that it is the fault—I do not want to put blame on anybody—or the responsibility of the Office for National Statistics, because it was the Office for National Statistics that decreed that the assets and liabilities of the Pension Protection Fund should be counted as part of the public sector national financial liabilities, rather than as part of the public sector net debt, but that decision was made in 2019. We are therefore more inclined to hold responsible the present Chancellor, who, in her Budget of last October, made the decision that, for the Government financial rules, the metric should no longer be the public sector net debt, but the public sector net financial liabilities. It was that that brought the PPF, as it were, on to this part of the playing field.
Mark Garnier
That is very helpful, thank you. I am very conscious that other Members will almost certainly have questions, but I must say that I entirely agree with you that a sum of money set aside for compensation should not be brought into the Government’s balance sheet.
Steve Darling
Q
Terry Monk: We have looked at all sorts of scenarios. I do not know whether Michelle is still here, but the problem is that, although the PPF has done all sorts of “what if” calculations about all sorts of “what ifs”—we have had copies, and the Work and Pensions Committee has had copies—we do know what the “what if” is. We know what our members have lost, but we will not know, until such time as we hear from the Government, what they are proposing. We have offered time and again to meet not just the current Pensions Minister, but previous Pensions Ministers—I have to say that a few of them would not even meet us. This Minister has met us, and he knows the issues, but we do not know what is in the mind of the DWP or the Treasury in dealing with this issue. Once we know that, we will know whether we are fighting or we are working together, and what the answer will be. To answer your question, there is a net effect benefit of paying that amount, but we are in the dark—we do not know how long the bit of string is.
Roger Sainsbury: Incidentally, one of the benefits of the cash coming in, supposing we do get indexation, is that it would at least make a contribution if the Government had decided they were also going to pay money to the FAS members. It would be a contribution to help offset the Treasury payments that would have to be made for the FAS.
Terry has referred to the situation, but I think the key thing is that in 2023 the Select Committee asked the PPF to provide financial estimates for what it would cost to do indexation. The PPF then produced some really excellent tables that showed a number of different hypothetical systems for delivering indexation. It was a bit like a restaurant menu. There was a possibility to have a scheme that would not be hugely beneficial, but that would not cost all that much money to administer, right through the range to a Rolls-Royce scheme, which would obviously cost a lot more money.
We have been asking for RIPA. Just to be absolutely clear, we are not asking for the grim reaper; we have had enough of him already, with people dying. This the bountiful RIPA—retrospective indexation plus arrears. We are pressing for that, but we did not invent it. It was not invented by the DPA. It was part of the menu that the PPF produced, and we merely picked it from the menu. RIPA is reasonably high up the menu, but it is not at the very top. There are other things that we are not asking for that we might have asked for, so we are not being greedy.
With respect to Terry, we are not bothering too much about what is in the PPF’s mind or in the Government’s mind. We are much more concerned with what we are trying to put into their mind. When we decided to go for pushing for RIPA, it was because RIPA is the minimum scheme of indexation that would have the effect of doing away with what is presently a two-tier membership within the PPF. There are two classes of membership: those with indexation and those without. There is nothing in the Bill making any provision for that. It is grossly unfair and it needs to be done away with, and it just happens that the RIPA option is the minimum way of getting rid of that deplorable two-tier membership. I think that gives you perhaps a fuller answer about the situation.
Terry Monk: Are we virtually out of time?
Mark Garnier
Q
Rachel Elwell: The LGPS is already investing significantly in the UK, as you have probably already heard. We invest more than 25% of the assets we look after on behalf of pension funds in the UK, and there is a very good reason for that, which I can explore a bit further if you would find it helpful.
To answer the specific question, I am not concerned that the power will instruct the LGPS to invest in specific things. I think there is a real intent; it would be helpful if the Bill were clear that it would not be against fiduciary duty and would not interfere with the FCA regulations that we are also subject to.
I am very thoughtful about how we carefully manage the weight of capital that might come into the market if there is mandation for the wider industry to move quickly into investing in the UK. Work will need to be done on the supply side as well as the capital side, to ensure that the UK can invest well the capital that should be being invested into the UK. So it is important that any use of mandation is very carefully considered, and that the laws of unintended consequences are really thought through.
Mark Garnier
Q
Rachel Elwell: I can understand why the Government would want to have a backstop power to direct pools, because the LGPS is significant—it is one of the top 10 globally by size. It has an impact on council tax, and on the economy more generally. If you have a pool that is not delivering and all the other mechanisms available to their stakeholders have failed, I can understand why that power would exist. But it is important that we clear the scenarios in which it is envisaged that it might be used.
Mark Garnier
Q
Rachel Elwell: History does not necessarily repeat itself, but it is important that we learn from that. The LGPS, and pensions more generally in the UK, have had many, many decades—including through the ’90s, having to manage the fact that there were contribution holidays taken that were using surpluses very quickly. Actuaries have the ability to work with all employers, including those in the LGPS, to smooth out that experience. Where you have a surplus, some of that could absolutely be used to help manage the costs over the long term, and when you have a deficit, you do not try to pay that all off very quickly, so I think there is an opportunity. I am not worried about it because I can see that the LGPS is a very well run, well governed scheme. It has good advice from its actuaries and is well used to making sure that both surpluses and deficits are smoothed over time.
Mark Garnier
Q
Rachel Elwell: I do think there is a fantastic opportunity for us to harness the benefits of scale that come from being one of the top 10 globally by size, but it is important, as we do that, that we maintain the link to local people who are the members of this.
Mark Garnier
Q
Rachel Elwell: Border to Coast, if we do have those 18, will stretch from the Scottish border to the southern coast. Even today, we have partner funds who are right across England, which is brilliant because those are people who have actively chosen to come together, form a partnership and work together.
Time permitting, if it is of interest to the Committee, we could talk a bit more about local investment and the way of getting investment that is truly local for each individual fund but also a way of crowding investment from other people into the slightly larger opportunities that might be in a region. Every investment we make is local—it impacts local people.
You do not need to only have, for example, Durham council investing in Durham. You want all of the LGPS and all asset owners to feel that they can do that. Some of the ways that we are working through doing local investment with our partner funds have really got an eye to the different ways in which you can crowd in versus something very specific that needs to be addressed in the region or locality.
Torsten Bell
Q
Rachel Elwell: Again, for all of us working in the LGPS, that sense of purpose is really important. I know my partner funds do a huge amount to make sure they are engaging directly with members, running events, as well as the importance of member representation on the pensions committees and on the pension boards, whether that is through union representation, pensioner representation or other scheme member representation.
We also have two fantastic scheme member representatives on our joint committee, which is the body that comes together across all of the partner funds to oversee and engage with what we are doing on their behalf. They are really bringing that voice into our considerations as a board and the wider organisation—the wider partnership.
The Chair
We will now hear oral evidence from Torsten Bell, who is the Minister for Pensions at the Department for Work and Pensions. We know who you are, but for the record and for those in the Public Gallery and watching the broadcast, would you kindly introduce yourself?
Torsten Bell: I am Torsten Bell, and I am the Pensions Minister.
Mark Garnier
Q
Torsten Bell: No, obviously. The change that you are referring to is a 2019 change under the last Government. It was taken not by the last Government but by the Office for National Statistics, and it refers not just to the PPF but to funded public sector pension schemes. The same issues apply to the LGPS in the same way. It is a 2019 change made by the statistics body following international guidance on accounting. The changes you are talking about have affected public sector borrowing since then.
Mark Garnier
Q
Torsten Bell: In stark contrast to lots of my predecessors, I have to say, I have spent a lot of time meeting members of both the PPF and the FAS who have been affected by the issue of pre-1997 accruals. If I am honest, the issue has been a real one since then, but it is a significantly bigger one because of the recent phase of high inflation, which made the pace of inflation eating into the real value of those pensions significantly faster. As I said on Second Reading—this was raised then by a number of colleagues on the Committee—we are considering the issue, but it needs to be considered in the round because of the wider public finance implications. That applies to other issues in this space as well; you will have seen that in other pension schemes where the Government have a role.
Mark Garnier
Q
Torsten Bell: To be clear, that is just wrong—it is not. The 2004 Act is very clear about the purposes for which the board’s assets can be used, and there is no question about that. The Office for National Statistics does not get to countermand Acts of Parliament on the use of resources—the 2004 Act is very clear on that. It is nothing to do with that.
If you look at the public sector finances in the round, there are all kinds of different forms of funds that are classified in different ways. The classification within the public finances is not determining the use to which funds can be put. The same applies to whether things are classified as taxes or not. They do their job, and obviously those classifications exist for an important reason, which is that we need to have clarity about the public finances. We use those for discipline in terms of making sure that Government objectives in fiscal policy have metrics that they can be tied to. It is totally reasonable for different parties to take different positions on what those metrics should be. There have been different choices made on that by lots of different parties in recent years, but I think everybody in this room probably accepts that you need to have those metrics. When you accept that, you will be in a situation where classifications by the Office for National Statistics impact on those.
Mark Garnier
Q
We heard some interesting evidence from Phoenix, who referred to clause 15 and the consequences of an intermediate performance rating. While we are going to have big arguments about mandation—that is something we fundamentally disagree on—one thing I hope we can both agree on, as we progress this, is that certain elements of the Bill could have unintended consequences. It seems that this one, the intermediate rating, could have the effect of maintaining the derisking of pension funds, because you are trying to avoid getting an intermediate rating and therefore you will avoid doing the slightly more progressed growth. Sorry; I am being incredibly inarticulate after rather a long day, but you know the point I am trying to make.
Torsten Bell: I definitely get the point you are making. Let me say one thing about the big picture, and then I will talk about the specifics you raise with the intermediate rating. On the big picture, I absolutely agree that one thing we have done badly in the last 30 years is to think about how changes we make to our pension system, which exists to provide income in retirement for the vast majority of the population, also underpin our capitalism. That is a lesson we have learned painfully.
On the substance of risk reduction, I would put it slightly differently, because you have different things going on in the DB and DC landscapes. In the DC landscape, we have been building up a new system. Understandably, because it was starting from small scale, we did not jump to trying to solve all the problems that came with that system, not least getting it to scale, not least what happens in retirement, and not least small pots and the rest. I see this Bill as doing that—taking the next step forward and saying, “Right, we are building this new system. We made big progress in the last 15 years with that, but now is the time to put the change in place.”
On scale and on value for money, that will support the wider range of investments more broadly, not just in the UK, but with a wider range of assets. That is absolutely the right thing, in savers’ interests, to do. I also completely endorse your point on unintended consequences, and that is exactly why scrutiny of the Bill is important to make sure that we pick those up as we go. The last 40 years, not just in this country but in others, shows that that can be the case, for good and ill.
Specifically on your point about the intermediate rating, we are very much aware of the issue. We are not aiming to replicate a hard metric: “fall one side of this line, and suddenly you are de-authorised from taking auto-enrolment contributions”. That is exactly what we need to avoid, which is what we will be doing. There is a reason behind the provision for more than one level of intermediate ranking, and my view would be that you would not expect people who fall into some of those levels being banned from taking further contributions. It is absolutely right that you do not want an absolute binary—just one metric, one division. The consultations that the FCA and TPR have taken forward are all about making sure that we have worked all those issues through. There are lessons, for example, from what happened in Australia.
Mark Garnier
Q
Torsten Bell: I understand the point you are making. I think you have to step back to the big picture, which is a consensus right across the industry that savers’ interests would be better served by change. It does not make sense that the UK industry is a complete outlier compared with other pensions systems around the world when it comes to exposure to wider ranges of assets. What comes with that exposure to a wider range of assets? The nature of assets, where you are likely to see a larger home bias in that more of them would be in the UK.
There is a wider point: is there a good reason why the UK DC pension landscape has a particularly large exposure to equities rather than to a wider range of assets that we see around the rest of the world? No. That is why you have seen the Mansion House accord coming forward—because it is in savers’ interests to change how we are operating. The scale and value-for-money measures, and a lot of the other approaches that we are taking, will facilitate that, but the industry is saying that that is in savers’ interests, and it is right to do so.
Ultimately, we have to step back and say that we are not in the business of just making individual random decisions about the pensions system. The question is: what is there a consensus on about the world we need to move to that has a better equilibrium? One of the strong elements of that, along with larger scale, is investing in a wider range of assets because that is in savers’ interests. That is why there is a voluntary Mansion House accord, setting that out as the objective, with relatively low levels of target, particularly on domestic investment, compared with what we see in other countries. That is what is going on.
What we are saying is that when you speak to the industry, particularly in private, it is very clear that there is a risk of a collective action problem. Under previous Conservative Chancellors, it signed up to commitments that it has not been delivering. Why has it not been delivering? Because of the collective action problem—the risk of being undercut by somebody else who is not making that change because of the nature of a market that is too focused on cost and not focused enough on returns.
I make only one vaguely political point. It is easy to join people in being anxious, but we have to ask ourselves something. There is a reason why the first Mansion House compact was not delivered. Do we want to be here in 15 years saying, “Actually, we all signed up to it and said it needed to happen, but it hasn’t”? No—I am not prepared to do that. Change is going to come. Everybody says that change needs to come because it is in members’ interests. All the reserve power does is to say that it is going to happen.
Steve Darling
Q
The other area that I want to ask about relates to the information that we heard from Nest: only 40% of its members had signed up online. That demonstrates that the issue is about getting positive engagement from those who are perhaps less financially secure. Are you confident that we are doing all we can through the Bill to help those who are most financially challenged? How are you going to hold yourself to account as we proceed to ensure that that is the case?
Torsten Bell: Those are great questions. On regulations, you are absolutely right. This pensions Bill, like most recent ones—although there have been exceptions that have come with unintended side effects, to go back to what was just mentioned—does rely heavily on secondary legislation. My view is that that is the right thing to do and is almost in the nature of pension schemes. That is partly because the detail should rightly be consulted on and partly because things will change in the context.
You are right that there is a large reliance on secondary legislation. Yes, in some areas, as we go through the detail, clause by clause, we will be able to set out to you where our thinking is up to. In lots of cases you will already see consultations by the FCA and TPR, starting to develop the work that will then feed into the regulations—that is particularly true, for example, on value for money, which we have just been discussing. I also think that it is important for us to provide clarity on when we will bring forward those regulations and when we will consult on the input to them, so that people know that. That was why, when we published the pensions reform road map, and when we published the Bill itself, I set out when we anticipate bringing forward those regulations so that everyone in the industry and in the House can see when that will happen. Page 17 of the road map sets out how we envisage that happening, and it is absolutely right. When we come to the clause-by-clause discussion, there will certainly be things where we will not be able to say, “This is exactly what will happen,” and rightly, because there needs to be further consultation with the industry on those things.
On the broader question of engagement with people, particularly those with smaller pensions—there is a very heavy correlation between the chance of someone being engaged with their pension and the size of that pension pot, partly for obvious reasons, but for wider context reasons, too—the pensions dashboard that Chris Curry mentioned earlier is a large part of facilitating that engagement. Lots of countries have had versions of the dashboard; it does make a material effect. One of the lessons from Australia is that the average size of DC pots, as they start to build rapidly—as that becomes the default system in an auto-enrolment world—does have a material effect.
I was with someone who runs one of the big supers recently; her view was that they hit a tipping point when there was suddenly this huge engagement where people were looking at the app provided by the super every week. There are pros and cons to that, by the way. Remember that there is a reason why we default people into pension savings. There are good and bad ways to engage with your pension. We do not want people on an app, in the face of a short-term stock market downturn, making drastic decisions to do with their investments that have long-lasting consequences. It needs to be done right; that is exactly why, when it comes to the dashboard, we are user testing it extensively.