Financial Services Reforms

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffith]

The hon. Member is quite right: it will be mandatory for all providers. That will be underwritten by legislation. The focus is to ensure that it is a usable, well regulated and well understood user experience for members.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

Over the last decade, thanks to automatic pension enrolment, an extra 10 million people have been able to save more for their retirement, but until now, due to investment restrictions, those returns have been limited. What my constituents want to know is, would the reforms announced today have been possible without Brexit, and how much better off will they be when it comes to retirement?

[Andrew Griffith]

I hope that my hon. Friend can reassure the constituents he so diligently represents that on average, as supported by the Government Actuary’s Department, if they started their working life now under the new assumptions about the compact, they could be up to £1,000 a year better off in retirement. That is a meaningful difference. At the end of the day, this is about making people’s money work better for them and harder for them and delivering them better outcomes. He is also right to observe that our ambitious programme of regulatory reforms, although it will never be divergence for divergence’s sake, could not have been achieved if it were not for the ability of this place to set the corpus of regulations under which financial services operate.