Pensions Bill

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Wednesday 26th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Turner of Ecchinswell]

My Lords, I will speak in favour both of transparency as per the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, and the Government’s amendment and also in favour of a clear commitment to a clear cap on scheme charges in line with Amendment 29 which also bears my name.

As I have already said this afternoon, the issue of total charges is fundamental to what we are trying to achieve with this Bill. The Government’s paper on charges makes it clear how important they are. Figure 2 says that if you are a saver throughout your life and you pay a charge of 0.5% when you get to retirement you will have given up 13% of your pot in charges. If the charge is 1.5%—which to the ordinary person might not seem all that much higher—you give up 34%. The difference between paying charges of 0.5% and 1.5% is that you will be 20% worse off throughout the whole of your retirement. This is not minor, but absolutely fundamental to how we achieve good provision for people in retirement.

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

Could the noble Lord be very kind and help me? Is he saying that the pot is a fixed figure and that therefore the percentage of charges has always to be related to the same end figure of the pot?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Drake]

I do not intend to make my contribution because I do not think there is anything I can add to what the noble Lord, Lord Turner, has said. However, as I have never been a Minister I am not familiar with the dark art of crafting ministerial syntax, so perhaps I could take this opportunity to ask the Minister a question before he responds.

I have before me the Written Ministerial Statement, which says:

“Last year, we consulted on whether to cap charges in the default funds of schemes used for automatic enrolment, and the Government remains committed to seeing this policy through during the life of this Parliament”.—[Official Report, Commons, 24/2/14; col. 11WS.]

My simple question is: does the phrase,

“seeing this policy through during the life of this Parliament”,

mean that the Government will introduce a charge cap before the election in 2015? A simple yes or no answer would be helpful.

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, I had not really intended to intervene. I have not played any part in this Bill since Second Reading, but I just want to draw attention to the fact that there is a difference, in my opinion, between price control and transparency.

I am 100% in favour of transparency. Perhaps I should declare that I have a very complicated pension situation. I have been in defined benefit schemes and money purchase schemes and I have a SIPP. I have also been the trustee of probably half a dozen pension schemes. I have done transfers of people under TUPE in the Local Government Pension Scheme. So I have had a lot of reasons to worry about the amount of somebody’s pension fund that is absorbed by costs. I am totally on board with complete transparency on that issue.

However, that is a different matter from price control. The problems in this market, which I fully agree has very considerable aspects of dysfunctionality, are created, in part at least, by the incredibly complicated structure of pensions that we have created, in both the public and private sectors, over many years. It is a very complicated subject and of course there are people who take advantage of that complexity, I completely agree. There are also people who are so frightened by the complexity that they do not know when they are getting value for money and when they are not.

That is my point: there is a great difference between a market which by its transparency enables people to see whether or not they are getting value for money and a market in which there is price control. Picking a figure for the price control would be a very foolish thing for any Government to do.