Pension Schemes Bill [ Lords ] (First sitting)

Richard Thomson Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 3rd November 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend makes an important and interesting point. If we are to be confident that these new scheme trustees will make decisions that are fair to both the working members of the schemes and to pensioners, it is important that the voices of working age members should be taken fully into account in the trustee board’s decisions. She makes a good argument about why diversity, specifically in respect of age, is important in this context.

It is not as though there is no evidence that diverse trustee boards do a better job. My hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North has just reminded the Committee that there is a substantial, growing body of evidence that diverse company boards make more effective decisions than homogeneous boards. We have talked about age, but we should not forget that the gender pensions gap, which is nearly 40%, is almost twice the size of the gender pay gap. The issues here are stark.

The Pensions Regulator commented on diversity in trustee boards for the first time last year:

“Our view is that pension boards benefit from having access to a range of diverse skills, points of view and expertise as it helps to mitigate against the risk of significant knowledge gaps or the board becoming over-reliant on a particular trustee or adviser. It also supports robust discussion and effective decision making.”

Amendment 25 would require those who put boards together to report to the Pensions Regulator on steps to ensure diversity considerations are taken into account in the recruitment of the trustee board, with regard to age, gender and ethnicity. I know that the Pensions Regulator has set up an industry working group to consider this issue, as part of the consultation that the Minister referred to, and to raise the profile of it. However, to be effective, that group needs data, and this amendment would help to provide it. I think the result of the amendment would be not only greater fairness but better trustee decisions. I commend the amendment to the Committee.

[Richard Thomson (Gordon) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer.

I will confine my brief remarks to amendments 6 and 25. I listened carefully and with interest to what the Minister said about the rationale for trying to withdraw clause 27 from the Bill. I agree that with him that in trying to come up with a legal definition of fairness, it will always be nebulous. There are clear difficulties around that, which is why I do not think the initial intention behind the clause was to provide absolute legal clarity.

I was reassured to a large extent by what the Minister said about the steps that would be taken to set up CDC schemes—by definition, schemes that are obviously unfair will not pass approval. The difficulty I have with that argument is that all that is being asked in clause 27 is that there is a requirement for trustees to make an assessment and nothing further. It is useful to have a process of self-challenge and continuous improvement, looking at aspects of the schemes that are directly under their control and that they can directly influence and alter. It is good to always have that consideration of whether the scheme is operating as fairly as possible for all present and future members and those taking benefits from it. My question to the Minister is, very simply, where is the harm? Even after taking on board all that he says, I still do not see the harm that lies in the Bill as it stands.

Moving on to amendment 25, I hear exactly what the Minister says about the requirement that already exists on trustees to be fit and proper people. My observation is that there are many potentially very fit and proper people who do not currently find themselves on boards, advisory committees or any of the governance structures around pensions, and who could nevertheless make a very good contribution to the running of those schemes.

Speaking from personal experience, prior to being elected as the Member for Gordon, I was a councillor in Aberdeenshire. Through that role, I was one of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities nominees to the Scottish local government pension scheme advisory board, whose representation was equally split between employers’ representatives, of which I was one, and trade union representatives. The trade union representatives were all extraordinarily capable and represented quite accurately the diversity of the scheme members whose interests they were there to represent. In all honesty, the employers’ representatives perhaps did not represent that quite so well. I played my own part in skewing that representation.

The requirement to report back on the membership characteristics is a very useful tool in trying to understand whether all that is reasonable is being done to ensure that trustees and those in positions of governance on pension schemes are as representative as possible not just of the membership, but of the interests of the membership, and that we are giving as many people as possible the opportunity to fully skill up, participate and play the role that they can do. As things stand, we are missing out on the talents of many fit and proper people. Again, I do not see the difficulty in simply recording and reporting that information as part of the cycle of continuous improvement and self-reflection on whether we are achieving all that we seek to do.

[Ms Eagle]

I want to support, or enhance, the comments that have just been made by Opposition Members about the two issues that we are discussing in this group of amendments: amendment 25 on diversity, which was tabled my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham, and the issue of intergenerational fairness and how it can be properly guaranteed in CDC schemes.

I hope the Minister will reaffirm on the record, in no uncertain terms, his agreement with the principles behind the amendment on intergenerational fairness that was made in the other place, even if he has issues with how one defines fairness in law. I have to say that, in social justice terms, we would have made very little progress in the whole of our society if we quibbled about the meaning of fairness in law. Just because it is difficult to define, it does not mean that we should not assert it or seek to bring it about.

The Minister’s response is a rather a technical answer to the principle that has been asserted by the change that their lordships made to this part of the Bill. His responses to my questions earlier did not fill me with confidence that he knew how the principle would be brought about if the amendment that their lordships put in the Bill was taken out. He simply seemed to say that it was a good thing to assert, and that it would be brought about by regulations that have not yet been written. He could not really give us any thoughts about how it might be guaranteed in the future, although he is asking us to take out an amendment that has actually been made to the Bill. He is asking us to exchange something that is really quite good and not damaging for something that is very nebulous and does not exist yet—it might do at some point in the future—in regulations that will be unamendable. We will have to take them or leave them when they come to the House, so I am slightly worried about that.

As is his wont, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham has zeroed in on the issue of diversity on boards and given us some shocking figures about what is happening on pension trustee boards. That ought to raise many alarm bells about potential group-think and about how the decisions made by trustee boards are not representing the interests of the many people who have pension savings in a way that we would find modern or appropriate.

Amendment 25 is a modest amendment. My right hon. Friend is asking only for the publication of information. He is not doing what I might do, which would be much more radical and would probably include all sorts of things, such as quotas and positive action, in order to make a real difference quite quickly. It is a modest amendment. If the Minister cannot accept that it is and does not have the good grace to support it, I will be rather disappointed.