Pension Schemes Bill

Debate between Torsten Bell and Julian Lewis

2nd reading
Monday 7th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I am extremely grateful to the Minister for taking my intervention and for the very helpful letter he sent me on 30 June about schemes of this sort, and in particular the ExxonMobil pension scheme. His letter encouragingly states:

“Following our reforms, trustees will continue to consider the correct balance of interest between members and the sponsoring employer when making decisions about the release of surplus funds. Trustees will be responsible for determining how members may benefit from any release of surplus…and have a suite of options to choose from—for example, through discretionary benefit increases.”

The trouble is that these pensioners have received a letter from the trustees of the ExxonMobil pension fund stating:

“The power to award discretionary increases is held by Esso Petroleum Company Limited (the “Company”). Whether or not any discretionary increase is provided is for the Company to determine: the Trustee has no power to award discretionary increases itself.”

This may be a loophole that the Minister needs to address. If the trustees cannot award the surplus as benefits and the company says no, that is not going to benefit my constituents.

[Torsten Bell]

I thank the right hon. Member for raising that specific case. I will look at it in more detail for him as he has kindly raised it here, but he has raised a point that will have more general application, which is that lots of different schemes, particularly DB schemes, will have a wide range of scheme rules. He has raised one of those, which is about discretionary increases. One thing that is consistent across all the schemes, with the legislation we are bringing in today, is that trustees must agree for any surplus to be released. It may be the case that the employer, in the details of those scheme rules, is required to agree to a discretionary increase, but the trustees are perfectly within their rights to request that that is part of an agreement that leads to a surplus release.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

What if it is the other way round?

[Torsten Bell]

In any circumstances, the trustees would need to agree to a surplus release, so they are welcome to say to their employer: we are only going to agree to it on the basis of a change to something that the employer holds the cards over. I am happy to discuss that with the right hon. Member further, and there may be other schemes that are in a similar situation.

Women’s State Pension Age: Financial Redress

Debate between Torsten Bell and Julian Lewis

Thursday 3rd July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Torsten Bell]

The hon. Gentleman is welcome to choose his tone; I will continue to the end of my comments. My job is to come and explain the Government’s decision, and to be held accountable for it. That is what I am doing today, and what I will continue to do over the course of my remarks. It is right that the Government are then asked questions about their decision; that is the nature of this democracy, as the hon. Member for East Wiltshire said.

An important consideration in the Government making this decision was that evidence showed that sending people unsolicited letters is unlikely to affect what they know. That is why letters are sent only as part of wider communication campaigns. This evidence was not properly considered by the ombudsman. Another consideration was that the great majority of 1950s-born women were aware of the state pension age changing, if not of a change in their specific state pension age, as several hon. Members have pointed out. My hon. Friend the Member for Salford mentioned the statistic of 43%, referring to the 2024 rather than 2023 survey. However, as she will know, that refers to all women, including some women as young as 16; if we look at the cohort of women born in the 1950s, the figure is far, far higher. On those and other grounds, we rejected the ombudsman’s approach to injustice and remedy.

Members will be aware that litigation is live, so I will not go into lots more detail on the research evidence, which is the core of that litigation. I will just say two things: first, our decision was based on published research reports, which were robust and met professional standards; secondly, the same awareness research, which the right hon. Member for New Forest East disparaged, was used by the ombudsman.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

Will the Minister explain to the House why not one single speech in this debate until his has taken the line that he is taking? Everyone who has spoken in this debate believes that some compensation, at least symbolically, should be paid.

[Torsten Bell]

I thank the right hon. Member for his intervention. I am a liberal man. People will come to different views on the evidence. There are many Members in the House who have campaigned powerfully on this issue over many years, and I respect the work they have done on that. I am setting out a different view from the one that the right hon. Member has taken. That is the nature of policy choice, the nature of accountability, and the nature of this debate.

The ombudsman is clear that redress and compensation should normally reflect individual impact, as it did in the case of the Equitable Life compensation scheme that an hon. Member mentioned. And they spell out the challenges of assessing the individual circumstances of 3.5 million women, not least given that it took the ombudsman nearly six years to look at just six cases. The reality is that assessing them would take thousands of staff very many years. We gave detailed thought to whether we could design a fair and feasible compensation scheme. However, most of the schemes that were suggested would not focus on women who lost opportunities as a result of the delay in sending letters. Rule-based schemes, such as that suggested by the Work and Pensions Committee, would make payments on the basis of the likes of age rather than injustice. Simply playing a flat rate to all 3.5 million women born in the 1950s, irrespective of any injustice, is also hard to justify.

Fundamentally, though, our decision was not only driven by cost—to answer directly the question of the hon. Member for Falkirk (Euan Stainbank)—but by the fact that we do not agree with the ombudsman’s approach to injustice or remedy for the reasons that I have set out. Indeed, our commitment to pensioners can be seen in the significant fiscal investments that we are making in our priorities for pensioners, including raising the state pension and rescuing the NHS.

Mansion House Accord

Debate between Torsten Bell and Julian Lewis

Tuesday 13th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Torsten Bell]

My hon. Friend is a powerful advocate for Leeds and for Britain every single week in this Chamber, and everything she said is completely right. The job of the National Wealth Fund and the British Business Bank is to work with our nations and regions to ensure that projects can be de-risked and supported and that a wide range of private investors can come in behind that and make sure change actually happens, so that this becomes a country that invests in its future once again.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

At a time when we have been commemorating a significant anniversary of VE Day, does the Minister share my concern that certain large pension firms are refusing to invest in profitable defence industries on spurious ethical grounds? Is that something that his pensions investment review might care to investigate?

[Torsten Bell]

I hear the point the right hon. Gentleman raises, and we have had those debates in this Chamber in recent months. The UK Government are doing what they need to do to invest in our security and defence and to support our defence industry more generally. We have made it very clear that private investment in those sectors is the right thing to do for our national security and our national economic growth. So far today, there have been calls for mandation and calls to oppose any mandation. There are choices available within pension funds for savers. The vast majority of funds—I think it is 99% within the National Employment Savings Trust, for example—invest in the broad defaults and do invest in the likes of defence companies.