Pension Schemes Bill

Debate between Torsten Bell and John Glen

2nd reading
Monday 7th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Torsten Bell]

That was not the support I was hoping for from the Chair—understandable, but harsh. I will come to some of the points that the right hon. Member raises. I think he is referring particularly to pre-1997 indexation, which I shall come to.

As I said, the Bill includes a reserved power that will allow the Government to require larger auto-enrolment schemes to invest a set percentage into wider assets. That reflects the wider calls that have been made for this change but have not led to its taking place. What pension providers are saying is that they face a collective action problem, where employers focus too narrowly on the lowest charges, not what matters most to savers: the highest returns. I do not currently intend to use the power in the Bill, but its existence gives clarity to the industry that, this time, change will actually come.

Some argue—I will come to some of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier)—that this somehow undermines the duty that pension providers have to savers. That is simply wrong. First, the Bill includes clear safeguards to prioritise savers’ interests and is entirely consistent with the core principle of trustees’ fiduciary duties. Clause 38 includes an explicit mechanism, which I have discussed with Members from the main three parties in this House, to allow providers to opt out if complying risks material detriment to savers. Secondly—this is the key point that motivates a lot of the Bill—savers are being let down by the status quo. There is a reason major pension schemes across the rest of the world are already investing in this more diverse range of assets.

Fragmentation within the pensions industry happens within providers, not just between them. Some insurers have thousands of legacy funds, so clause 41 extends to contract schemes the ability that trust-based schemes already have to address that. Providers will be able to transfer savers to another arrangement without proactive individual consent if, and only if, it is independently certified as being in the member’s best interest.

Another point that I hope is of common ground across the House is that we need to do more to realise the untapped potential of the local government pension scheme in England and Wales. We need scale to get the most out of the LGPS’s £400 billion-worth of assets. Again, the Bill will turn that consensus into concrete action. It provides for LGPS assets spread across 86 administering authorities to be fully consolidated into six pools. That will ensure that the assets used to provide pensions to its more than 6 million members—predominantly low-paid women—are managed effectively and at scale. Each authority will continue to set its investment strategy, including how much local investment it expects to see. In fact, these reforms will build on the LGPS’s strong track record of investing in local economic growth, requiring pension pools to work with the likes of mayoral combined authorities. In time, bigger and more visible LGPS pools will help to crowd private pension funds and other institutional investors into growth assets across the country.

Our measures will build scale, support investment and deliver for savers, but the Bill does more to ensure that working people get the maximum bang for every buck saved. To reinforce the shift away from an excessively narrow focus on costs, clause 5 provides for a new value-for-money framework. For the first time, we will require pension schemes to prove that they provide value for money, with standardised metrics. That will help savers to compare schemes more easily, and drive schemes themselves to focus on the value that they deliver. For persistently poor performers, regulators will have the power to enforce consolidation. That will protect savers from getting stuck in poorly performing schemes—something that can knock thousands of pounds off their pension pots.

We are also at last addressing the small pension pots issue. I was out door-knocking in Swansea earlier this spring, and a woman in her mid-30s told me that something was really winding her up—and it was not me knocking on the door. [Laughter.] This is a very unsupportive audience. It was trying to keep track of small amounts of pension savings that she had from old jobs; the only thing that was worse was that her husband kept going on about it. There are now 13 million small pension pots that hold £1,000 or less floating around. Another million are being added each year. That increases hassle, which is what she was complaining about, with over £31 billion-worth of pension pots estimated to currently be lost. It costs the pensions industry around £240 million each year to administer. Clause 20 provides powers for those pots to be automatically brought together into one pension scheme that has been certified as delivering good value. Anyone who wants to can of course opt out, but this change alone could boost the pension pot of an average earner by around £1,000.

Of course, once you have a pension pot, the question is: what do you do with it? We often talk about pension freedoms, but there is nothing liberating about the complexity currently involved in turning a pension pot into a retirement income. You have to consolidate those pots, choose between annuities, lump sums, drawdowns or cashing out. You have to analyse different providers and countless products. Choice can be a good thing, but this overwhelming complexity is not—77% of DC savers yet to access their pension have no clear plan about how to do so.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

I agree with a lot of what the Minister is saying. Given what was said last week by the Financial Conduct Authority on targeted support, would he look again at what is being resisted by the Money and Pensions Service? It is not prepared to work with the pension schemes to allow automatic appointments so that pension savers can be guided to better outcomes. I realise that MaPS will say that it is too busy, but this is a key moment. If we could get people to engage at age 50, say, we would see vastly different outcomes for them if they invested properly, and in better ways, with their pensions.

[Torsten Bell]

I thank the right hon. Member for his question, and for the discussions that we have had on this important topic. He spent years working on this. The priority for MaPS right now is to ensure that we have the system set up to deal with the additional calls that are likely to come when pension dashboards are rolled out, but I will keep in mind the point that he raises. I think he and a number of hon. Members wrote to me about exactly that point. As I promised in my letter, I will keep it under review, but we must not overburden the system, because we need it to be able to deliver when pension dashboards come onstream.

Winter Fuel Payment

Debate between Torsten Bell and John Glen

Monday 9th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Torsten Bell]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight the targeting. Setting the means test threshold at £35,000 ensures that it is well above the income levels of pensioners in poverty and is around the average earnings level. On policy in Scotland, an important principle of devolution is that those are decisions for the Scottish Government, but they are also decisions for which they will be held accountable.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

Over several fiscal events over seven years, the option of removing the winter fuel payment from the wealthiest was resisted by the previous Government because there was not seen to be an effective rationing mechanism and there were considerable presentational challenges. Will the Minister confirm that pensioners with no mortgage and with significant tax-wrapped savings in individual savings accounts or venture capital trusts, but with a monthly pension of £2,500, will still be fully entitled to receive the winter fuel payment?

[Torsten Bell]

I always enjoy discussing technical details with the right hon. Gentleman. I set the position out clearly in my initial statement: means-testing is based on taxable income of £35,000, which answers his question.

Mansion House Accord

Debate between Torsten Bell and John Glen

Tuesday 13th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Torsten Bell]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. She has long talked about both the issues that she raises: the regional balance of investment and the ability of growing firms to get hold of growth finance. The latter is a long-standing problem in the UK economy, and today’s accord will help to address it. Although we talk about private assets and investment helping with infrastructure, it is also about providing growth capital to a wider range of firms. Obviously, the onus is on us and private asset managers to provide ways for pension funds to direct capital. Those are often small-ticket items, and pension funds will need them to be aggregated up to a higher level. That is exactly the work of the British Business Bank, which I know she has engaged with through the Select Committee. On both points, she is 100% right.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

Undoubtedly, the City of London is not in the best possible place when it comes to where it is investing and the amount invested in UK equities. When I was a Minister, we had the Hill review, the Kent review, the Austin review and the capital markets review. Everything was done to seek to open up the City to more initial public offerings and more momentum. This systemic undervaluing of UK equities, and therefore the lack of investment in them, needs to be set alongside the fact that billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is used to enrich the size of pension schemes through tax reliefs. I urge the Minister to continue engaging with the City. I welcome the voluntary commitments given, but we must come to the point where the risk-aversion of DB schemes is called out, considering the amount of taxpayers’ money that is effectively going into them. Will the Minister continue to look carefully at the options available, given that the previous Government sought—and his Government will no doubt continue to seek—to meet them wherever possible?

[Torsten Bell]

I always enjoy discussing these things with the right hon. Member, as we have done over recent months. He offers a recognition of the challenge facing the country, and in focusing on what we can do to start changing things, he takes a much better position than that adopted by his Front Benchers.

I recognise the right hon. Member’s point about risk-aversion. There is a need for more innovation in our pension landscape more generally—that is one of the areas in which I am glad to see progress. I take a slightly more positive view than he does on the consensus that things need to change. We are seeing that in the pensions industry more generally, partly in relation to investing in a wider range of assets, as well as in embracing the agenda that we are setting out for a smaller number of bigger pension funds that are able to take different kinds of risks.

The right hon. Member asks specifically about public equities. My view is that the accord from the industry today will support that by funding a pipeline of companies that can grow to the level at which they can list publicly. Also, private assets will include private shares, including the alternative investment market and others. I think the picture is slightly more positive than the one he paints, but I am not hiding from the wider question he raises about capital markets. The UK Government, the Chancellor and my colleague the City Minister are focused on that—he will have heard their words on ISA reform and the rest of it. I look forward to further conversations on that.

Agricultural Property Relief

Debate between Torsten Bell and John Glen

Tuesday 28th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury (Torsten Bell)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate with you in the Chair, Mr Stringer. I congratulate the hon. Member for Caerfyrddin (Ann Davies) on securing this debate and for engaging with many different pronunciations of the name of her constituency over the course of the last hour and a half. She rightly makes a powerful case for Welsh farming, which all of us in south Wales would like to reinforce.

We will not all agree on the policy under discussion today, but we all agree that topics such as this are important to many and should be properly discussed in this place—ideally at a lower temperature than in this room. I have listened closely to the contributions to the debate, and I thank all hon. Members for setting out their views and for speaking on behalf of not only their constituents, but their acquaintances, friends and family members. The hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) made a clear case about the emotional, not just economic, importance of land to farmers and farming families. Most of us will have someone close to us who farms, but even those who do not will recognise the huge contribution that our farmers make to our food security, our economy and our rural communities. None of us takes those contributions for granted, and we have heard that today.

Before I turn to the specific points raised by hon. Members, I will briefly—I promise it will be brief—set out the context for the Budget decisions we are debating. This Government’s inheritance matters, however much the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) declines to mention it. We had unsustainable public finances, equally unsustainable and struggling public services, councils going bust and prisons overflowing, so tough decisions were unavoidable in the Budget if we were to restore economic stability, fix the public finances and support public service. That is the backdrop to the decision to reform agricultural property relief.

That decision was not taken lightly, but it was a necessary decision, not least because rural communities lose out more than most when health, transport and council services across the UK do not live up to the standards that any of us expect. It was the right decision, because the Government will maintain significant levels of inheritance tax relief for agricultural property, far beyond what is available for most assets, because we recognise the role that those reliefs play in supporting farmers.

The debate is really about how we balance the objectives of protecting family farms with the public finances and public services. The status quo—the full, unlimited exemption introduced in 1992—has become unsustainable. The benefits have become far too heavily skewed towards the wealthiest estates. Some 40% of agricultural property relief benefits the top 7% of estates making claims. The top 2% claim 22% of the relief, which means 37 estates are claiming £119 million in a single—

[John Glen]

The Minister is a serious economist with a serious track record in analysing public finances. With all due respect, given the significant uncertainty and the fact that numerous organisations representing farming interests outside the party political debate have asked serious questions about the deliverability of the scheme and the amount of money that will be raised, surely he must accept that there is time for people such as he to work with officials to find better ways of finding the sums that he says he needs—I am not disputing that—to do the right thing by the farming communities of this country and not cause the unintended damage that will clearly take effect.

[Torsten Bell]

I thank the right hon. Member for his kind words, even though I cannot agree with everything that followed. I will come on to some of the points that he raised shortly. I think this will come up several times in the course of what remains of the debate, but we cannot use farm valuation data to make claims about inheritance tax claims. On the latter, we have the actual data for the claims made, which is what we rely on.