My Lords, I take this opportunity to thank all noble Lords for the positive engagement and feedback they have provided over the past couple of weeks and since the Bill was originally introduced in October last year. From the conversations I have had with many noble Lords, I believe there is a genuine desire across the House to tackle the matters addressed by the Bill. It is my sincere hope that we can continue to engage in this way as the Bill progresses through this House. Should any noble Lord wish to discuss any part of the Bill between its stages, our doors are always open.
It is unlikely to have escaped noble Lords’ attention that this is not a small Bill, partly because we have also legislated for Northern Ireland. Now there is a functioning Assembly again we have been in contact with Northern Ireland Ministers to establish whether they are content in principle for Westminster to legislate on their behalf in this Bill. I believe it is important to ensure that the people of Northern Ireland also benefit from the changes and safeguards put in place for the rest of Great Britain.
Although the Evening Standard referred to the Bill in October as a morsel of “fresh legislative meat,” it is far more than that. It has been built on consensus across the pensions community and political spectrum and has consumer protection at its heart. It focuses on a range of key measures that are a priority today, not just for those who are already receiving a pension, but for record numbers who are now saving for their retirement. This Bill will help people plan for the future, provide simpler oversight of pensions savings and protect people’s savings by providing greater powers for the Pensions Regulator to tackle irresponsible management of private pension schemes.
Before I talk a little more about the measures in this Bill and why they are so important, I would like to touch on delegated powers. I know from talking to noble Lords that there are some concerns about the number of delegated powers in the Bill and how they may be used. There are a number of good reasons why we have structured the Bill the way we have, and we will respond fully to any concerns the DPRRC may have when we reply to its report. However, I have listened to what your Lordships have said to me and have asked my officials to prepare illustrative regulations under Part 1 before we reach Committee. I hope that they will help your Lordships understand the way delegated powers in that part are intended to be used and the limitations in pre-empting their use.
The measures in this Bill build on the reforms of the past 10 years, and I shall take a few moments of noble Lords’ time to explain how. On Part 1, which relates to collective defined contribution schemes, which are known as CDCs, current UK pensions law defines all private pension benefits as either money purchase, where investment and longevity risks are shouldered by the individual member, or as non-money purchase, where all risks are born by the sponsor, usually an employer or insurer. Current pensions legislation means that new types of pension schemes have to fit within those two definitions. This stifles innovation and prohibits new kinds of risk sharing.
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her introduction of the Bill. It is her first pension Bill and we wish her well. I welcome the open approach that she has signified and the focus already on delegated powers, which I am sure we will discuss extensively.
As we have heard, the Bill focuses on three significant areas: a framework for setting up, operating and regulating “collective money purchase” schemes, otherwise known as collective defined contribution pensions or CDC; enhanced powers for the pensions regulator; and pensions dashboards. As we have heard, Part 1 relates to England, Scotland and Wales and Part 2 to Northern Ireland. We have agreed to consider these in parallel.
My noble friend Lady Drake will focus in particular on matters relating to the dashboard while my noble friend Lady Sherlock will focus on the powers of the regulator. On the former, we know that the move away from DB schemes has been accompanied by a growing tendency for individuals to lose track of their pension pots through moving house or changing jobs. That is why we support the dashboard, but with a preference for it to be a single publicly funded one. On the latter, we are registering concerns about the breadth of Clause 107 and will wish to pursue them in Committee. Otherwise, we are broadly in agreement with the measures in the Bill. I acknowledge the close engagement of my colleague Jack Dromey MP with the Royal Mail and the CWU in formulating the CDC proposals.
In concentrating on the main provisions, though, we should not overlook the measures in Part 5, which the Minister referred to and which also have our support. These variously provide for amendments to DB scheme funding to help improve decision-making and governance across the sector. This runs from the 2018 White Paper, which concluded that DB pension schemes were well managed on average, and we agree with the proposal for a DB funding code. Although active membership of DB schemes continues to fall—in the private sector it now has some 500,000 members, but with assets of £1.5 trillion—we should not write them off. However, we understand that the Pensions Minister, Guy Opperman, has made it clear that he would not support CDC schemes being a route to enable the closure of DB schemes. How is this secured in the Bill, if indeed it is? How many more CDC schemes, if any, are currently being considered? I take it from her introduction that the answer should be none, but it would be good to have that on the record.
My Lords, for the sake of transparency, I should record that one of my children works for the Money and Pensions Service and that I have not had, nor will I have, any discussions about any of the matters covered by the Bill with her—or, probably, about anything else.
We welcome the Bill and the Minister’s openness and willingness to engage. We congratulate the Government on their engagement with stakeholders; we especially congratulate the Royal Mail and the CWU on their successful advocacy for CDC schemes. We think it a good thing that the Bill makes general provision for these schemes, rather than for only a bespoke Royal Mail scheme. However, we have some serious reservations about the approach taken by the Bill in several key areas. In large part, especially in Part 1, this is actually a skeleton Bill. Let me take CDCs or, as the Bill now calls them, CMPB schemes. As I said, we support the general idea enthusiastically but have serious concerns about how the Bill sets things out.
Our greatest concern is the number and scope of the powers to make regulations given to the Secretary of State. Part 1 runs to 41 pages. In these 41 pages, I counted 39 separate instances of giving the Secretary of State powers to make delegated legislation. I recognise that pensions legislation is often necessarily complex and that secondary legislation plays a vital role. But it is very difficult to have a realistic view of the Bill’s effects or scrutinise it effectively if we have no detail at all of this secondary legislation. Perhaps the Minister can explain why it has not been possible to provide drafts of these regulations. After all, the Bill was first presented to Parliament last October.
I also draw the Minister’s attention to the apparently random use of affirmative and negative procedures for the regulation-making powers. Can she give the House guidance on the principles underlying the choice of procedure? In particular, can she explain why, on numerous occasions, the first use of a regulatory power is subject to the affirmative procedure but all subsequent uses of the same power are subject only to the negative procedure?
My Lords, I too generally welcome the Bill, which makes a number of improvements to the pensions landscape. However, there are a few areas that I would like to raise.
I welcome the introduction of the new class of pensions: collective money purchase schemes, or CDCs. The ability to pool risks across members should bring real benefits, including potentially higher pensions than current defined contribution schemes can produce. However, I would strike a note of caution. I fear that these schemes are being seen as a replacement for defined benefit schemes, which they most emphatically are not.
First, as the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, said, we must clearly understand that CDC schemes do not guarantee any particular level of pension but merely provide a target. More importantly, even once you start to receive your pension, the amounts paid each year are still not guaranteed and may go down as well as up. That is a fundamental difference compared with defined benefit schemes and annuities purchased under defined contribution schemes. Retirees will expect their pension to at least grow in line with inflation, but the experience in the Netherlands shows that that is not always the case. Indeed, none of the five largest Dutch schemes has managed to keep up with inflation over the last decade, and three of them have made cuts in nominal terms to the level of benefits. If we are to avoid scandal, this risk must be clearly communicated, with very clear health warnings when people sign up to a CDC, in any communication that includes a forecast, and when people are nearing retirement, so that they understand the risk that their pension is not a fixed and growing amount.
Secondly, the principal benefits from CDC schemes arise, as we have heard, from the pooling of risk. However, when risk is shared, there are inevitably winners and losers. As the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, mentioned, it is important to ensure that we do not create further intergenerational unfairness. Because employers have no obligation to increase funding, a CDC scheme has only two ways of reacting to lower returns: cutting benefits for existing pensioners or raising contribution levels for employees, or a combination of both. It is always easier to push the problem into the future. This creates the risk that one group is favoured over another. Trustees and the regulator will need to ensure that risks and returns are not skewed against the younger generation to the benefit of pensioners, or indeed the other way around. It would be good if the Minister could comment on these issues.
My Lords, I declare my interest as set out in the register of interests and warmly welcome my noble friend to the Front Bench on the Bill. I certainly agree that this is far more than a morsel: whoever called it that had not quite seen its scale. I warmly welcome it.
My remarks will be mostly framed from the perspective of members of pension schemes, customers of pension providers, and their interests, being future pensioners. Part 1 on collective defined contribution, is adding a new type of pension scheme with the concept of a target pension. As the noble Lords, Lord McKenzie and Lord Sharkey, mentioned, it is important that people realise that this is not one of the two current systems. It is not a money purchase system, where there is no guaranteed outcome and members shoulder all the investment risk and costs, whatever the final outcome. Nor is it a non-money purchase scheme, where there is some element of guarantee: either the traditional defined benefit with an assured lifetime pension income—although that can be reduced in the PPF—or the assurance of a lump sum payment, where employers bear some of the risk and the costs, beyond just their contributions.
The aim of this scheme is to ensure that employers know the limits of their liabilities. That means that the huge challenge with the CMPSs, as they will be called—we have added another acronym to our arsenal—will be communications to explain the lack of security that these schemes will provide.
The shouldering of investment risk and the intergenerational risks is vital for us to help members to understand. As with the Netherlands and Denmark, as the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, mentioned, CDC pensions can reduce when in payment. The risk is still on the worker. Although the scheme will bear the cost of the actuarial analyses, and will look after the management of investment choices and the decumulation options for some members if they stay, there are still residual risks. The Bill is not yet sufficiently robust on what regulatory protection there should be for members’ money. Of course, Royal Mail, which is expected to be the first scheme using this CDC structure, may be a powerful and well-resourced employer.
My Lords, I draw attention to my interests in the register. I too welcome this Bill, but I believe that parts need strengthening.
The Pensions Regulator protects pensions from the moral hazard of employers avoiding their responsibilities, but the BHS and Carillion cases raise two questions of public interest to tackle today: is the regulator deploying its existing powers in an effective and timely manner, and are the powers in the regulator’s armoury sufficient to prevent employers avoiding their responsibilities?
The regulator’s recent activities have focused on using and testing the full range of existing powers. This Bill strengthens them—which is welcome—extending when an employer can be required to contribute money into a scheme, and enhancing powers to collect information and sanctioning those that mislead on corporate activities.
During the Work and Pensions Select Committee inquiry into BHS, documents from the regulator revealed that on 9 March 2015 the chair of trustees advised the regulator that they were still awaiting from the company information needed to make the moral hazard assessment. Two days later the company was sold.
Clause 107 introduces new civil and criminal sanctions. I welcome the Government’s intention to address what they describe as plundering by “reckless bosses”. But concerns have been expressed, including by the Association of Pension Lawyers, that a power designed to prevent future BHS and Carillion-type situations has been drawn incredibly widely, such that it could criminalise minor actions or ordinary business activities and expose third parties such as banks and even trade unions to sanctions, giving rise to consequences not properly considered. I certainly support stiffer sanctions, but these concerns should be probed, given the range and credibility of the people expressing them. Will the Government give consideration to the concerns expressed?
My Lords, I only very recently decided to speak on the Bill. Unfortunately, due to other commitments, I was unable to attend any of the meetings with the Minister—but that will be forthcoming in due course. But here are my initial thoughts on what I have found out so far as, I suppose, a newcomer to pensions.
I agree with all the Bill’s general intentions, but there are some areas where I do not think it has gone far enough and many where pensioners’ security will depend on regulations that we have very little policy guidance on, or reassurance about, in the Bill. I note that the Minister said that we will have illustrative regulations, but we need the shape of the policy and how far in the future those regulations can or cannot go outlined in the Bill. I hope that, once they are written, something can be adduced from them and reflected backwardly.
Collective money purchase schemes seem entirely sensible for well-known reasons that have already been explained. They enable longevity and other risks to be pooled, and they potentially allow a more consistent investment policy. That is the theory, at least, but it has to be recognised, especially in the potential case of smaller schemes, that the pooled advantages can be undermined by too many transfers out, or even the equivalent of a run by older members. What safeguards are there? Can the Minister say whether this will be kept under watch and count as an “event” to trigger the operation of some safeguards or a continuity plan?
It is clear that a person who has the power to take decisions under the scheme, or a trustee, can intervene to indicate that, for example, the fund should be wound up—but what if they do not give such an indication? How is the regulator to know and intervene; is it only through obtaining valuations and making directions under Clause 23, or are there other mechanisms that make sure that the regulator is well informed?
My Lords, I wish to make a brief contribution to this Second Reading debate and, like others, I welcome the provisions in the Bill. I wish my noble friend well in piloting it through your Lordships’ House and commend her and her department for the briefing with which they have provided us.
It may be my noble friend’s first pensions Bill but I hope she will not mind if I tell her that I first spoke on a pensions Bill on 18 March 1975. The Bill was Barbara Castle’s Social Security Pensions Bill and the Opposition spokesmen were the now noble Lord, Lord Fowler, and Mr Kenneth Clarke. I must have been the Whip on the Bill, and reading my Second Reading speech, I was clearly a pretty obnoxious young man, haranguing Barbara Castle as follows:
“As a generation we have the collective effrontery to insist that our children make sacrifices on our behalf, on a scale that we are not prepared to make on behalf of the elderly today.”—[Official Report, Commons, 18/3/1975; col. 1538.]
I went on:
“If the benefits which she has promised are forthcoming, it is not she whom we ought to thank but the future generations, as yet unborn, who have been committed by her to a level of contributions that we are not prepared to pay ourselves.”
My parting shot at Barbara Castle was:
“I leave the Minister with this thought. How sad it would be if, in order to meet the contributions that future generations will have to make, the retirement age had to be raised to generate the necessary income.”—[Official Report, Commons, 18/3/1975; col. 1540.]
That was an accurate prediction of what has in fact happened.
Forty-four years later, and a beneficiary of that Bill, I want to focus my remarks on Part 4, dealing with the pensions dashboard. Like other noble Lords, I welcome putting this on a statutory footing and placing a requirement for pension schemes to provide information for the dashboard. Most people make inadequate provision for their old age, despite the success of auto-enrolment, and this is particularly true of young people. The excellent briefing by Which? for this debate showed that half of those over 50 and still in employment are not sure of the value of their pension savings, one-third find it difficult to keep track of their pension pots and one-fifth have never checked. The dashboard will bring home to people at the flick of a mouse what their entitlement will be and perhaps cause them to think seriously about whether that will suffice. Perhaps the dashboard might have some options indicating what that individual’s contributions would need to be if they wanted to retire on today’s salary.
5:27 pm
20 of 60 shown
Part 1 sets out the regulatory framework for new collective money purchase schemes. These are more commonly known as collective defined contribution schemes or CDCs. In developing these measures, I welcome the cross-party and external stakeholder support for the methodology and the legislative approach that the Government have used. The measures facilitate, and build upon, the initiative between the Royal Mail and the Communication Workers Union which have concluded that a CDC scheme would best suit their needs for the future. I put on the record our thanks for the constructive and supportive way in which both Royal Mail and the Communication Workers Union have engaged in developing these measures. It is right for us to support employers and unions working together to bring about such a positive outcome. The scheme will be the first of its type in the UK, and it offers a model for other employers and other workforces to launch their own schemes.
There has been some interest in CDC provision from other unions and large commercial master trusts. However, we believe that this new type of provision and the supporting regulatory regime need time to bed in before a decision is made on whether multiple employer, sector-specific or commercial CDC provision should be facilitated. Nevertheless, the Bill provides for us to adapt the legislation, where appropriate, to extend the framework in the future.
These new schemes will enable contributions to be pooled and invested to give members a target benefit level. They aim to deliver for members an income in retirement without the high cost of guarantees and without placing unpredictable future liabilities on the employer, and they will give employers new options for managing their pension obligations.
In its press release on the Bill’s introduction in October, the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association said that CDC schemes
“offer employers increased flexibility and choice in how they structure schemes to benefit savers.”
Further, Hymans Robertson commented:
“Providing a framework for collective money purchase schemes … will offer the clear benefits that can be derived from pooling of these risks across individuals.”
I hope that we can all welcome these measures, which enable employers and workers to come together in a way that will benefit both.
I move on to CDCs in Northern Ireland and shall focus briefly on Part 2 of the Bill. As noble Lords know, private pensions are a devolved matter for Northern Ireland. Throughout the development of this Bill, Ministers and officials have worked closely with the Northern Ireland Office and the Department for Communities, Northern Ireland. In the absence of an Assembly, the Department for Communities has asked the UK Parliament to include provisions for Northern Ireland in the Bill. This will ensure regulatory alignment across the UK and parity for pension schemes and their members in Northern Ireland. Part 2 and other clauses embedded in each part of the Bill therefore make provision for corresponding Northern Ireland legislation.
Moving on to the Pensions Regulator, several recent high-profile insolvency cases in relation to defined benefit pension schemes have weakened confidence in the pensions system. They have highlighted that the existing regulatory regime is not always an effective deterrent to serious wrongdoing. Doing nothing will mean that more people are likely to be affected by employers not taking their responsibilities seriously, and the existing fines that the Pensions Regulator can pursue are an ineffective deterrent to more serious wrongdoing. In order to amend the existing powers and provide the regulator with new powers, changes and additions must be made through primary legislation. Not doing so will mean that the current gaps and problems continue to exist.
Part 3 addresses that and fulfils a commitment that we made in 2017. It places a requirement on those responsible for corporate transactions to set out in a statement how they will mitigate any adverse effects on the pension scheme. The measures will improve the regulator’s information-gathering powers, enabling it to enter a wider range of premises and require individuals to attend an interview. This will boost the regulator’s ability to ensure that those responsible comply with pensions legislation. There will also be new civil and criminal sanctions to punish those who wilfully or recklessly harm their pension scheme, including a maximum seven-year prison sentence and a civil penalty of up to £1 million.
I know that some noble Lords have expressed concern about the adequacy of the sentences outlined in the Bill and have advocated even tougher ones. We have set the maximum level of the financial penalty at a level similar to equivalent sanctions in the financial sector for financial crimes. However, we also recognise that there might be a need to increase this maximum amount in the future to ensure that the financial penalty continues to provide suitable levels of deterrence and punishment. The Bill therefore includes a regulation-making power enabling the maximum amount of the financial penalty to be increased if needed in the future.
Charles Counsell, the chief executive of the Pensions Regulator, said of these measures:
“Fines and criminal sanctions, combined with improved avoidance powers, have the potential to act as a strong deterrent in respect of behaviour that represents a risk to savers.”
The Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association was also clear, saying:
“While most pension schemes are well-run and managed, high-profile cases like Carillion and BHS damage confidence in the pensions system. We support new powers for the Pensions Regulator to take action sooner, impose significant fines, and have more oversight of risky corporate transactions in order to prevent reckless behaviour and protect savers’ hard-earned money.”
Cumulatively, the improvements to the regulator’s powers outlined in this Bill will help the regulator to meet its aim of being “clearer, quicker, and tougher”. In turn, this will afford increased protection for defined benefit scheme members’ savings.
Part 4 of the Bill delivers on our commitment to provide for pensions dashboards. Many savers worry that they do not have adequate information or knowledge to enable them to plan and make decisions about their saving for retirement. This can be exacerbated by the fact that it can be hard for savers to keep track of pension savings where they have had multiple jobs. Dashboards will provide an online service allowing people to view all their pension information—including state pension—in a single place.
The measures in this Bill set out the legislative framework to define what a qualifying dashboard service is, along with requirements that must be met by potential dashboard providers. Importantly, they will compel occupational, personal and stakeholder pension schemes to present an individual’s pension information to them through a qualifying dashboard service. To make sure that they do, the measures also introduce compliance powers for enforcement of this requirement through the Financial Conduct Authority and the Pensions Regulator. Finally, Part 4 also provides for the Money and Pensions Service to oversee the development of the dashboard infrastructure.
As I said earlier, there is broad support for pensions dashboards. For example, Aegon has commented:
“Millions of individuals have multiple pensions in which they’ve built up benefits over their working lives and Pension Dashboards will for the first time allow them to see all of these, online at the touch of a button. This offers a huge opportunity to help millions of individuals better engage with their retirement planning”.
I turn now to Part 5 of the Bill. The measures within this part cover four important areas. Clause 123 and Schedule 10 relate to defined benefit scheme funding. The defined benefit landscape is changing, with many schemes now closed to new members and future accrual. As more schemes reach maturity, with fewer contributing members and more members receiving their pension benefits, it is important that we act now to ensure that trustees manage their funding and investment in a way that is appropriate to the specific characteristics of their scheme.
The measures in the Bill will enable the Pensions Regulator to enforce clearer scheme funding standards in defined benefit pension schemes. They will support the regulator’s risk-based regulatory approach by introducing a requirement for trustees to have a funding and investment strategy for the scheme, and for the statutory funding objective to be achieved consistently with this strategy. The measures also require trustees to explain their approach to the regulator in a statement of strategy. The measures can require trustees to send this statement to the regulator at such occasions and intervals as may be prescribed.
These provisions seek to help trustees to improve their scheme funding and investment decisions, and to better manage potential risk. They enable the regulator to take action more effectively to protect members’ pensions, mitigate risks to the Pension Protection Fund, and take account of the sustainable growth of the employer.
Clause 124 introduces new powers to protect individuals’ pensions savings by helping trustees to prevent transfers to fraudulent schemes through restricting the statutory right to transfer a pension. This will protect members from pension scams by helping trustees of occupational pension schemes to ensure that transfers of pension savings are made to safe, not fraudulent, schemes.
Clause 125 rectifies some of the unintended outcomes of a High Court judgment. It retrospectively restores the policy intent with regard to the calculation of Pension Protection Fund compensation payments. The measure will provide statutory cover for past payments and will ensure that there is no question of vulnerable members being asked to repay any overpayments.
Clause 126 updates the definition of “administration charge” to make clear which costs are in scope of the overarching definition contained in the Pensions Act 2014.
I beg to move.
So we have DB, DC and now CDC schemes. How can an individual best save in a cost-effective manner for a predictable income in retirement? An individual would of course typically not know for how long they might live, but they should know with greater accuracy how long on average a group of people might live. So finding ways of harnessing collective arrangements to allow the sharing of longevity risk is one way forward, and that applies to CDC.
Much of our consideration of pensions policy provisions hitherto has been a binary matter, with choices conducted between DB and DC schemes. On the one hand, the investment, longevity and inflation risk are with the sponsoring employer, and on the other, they are with the individual member until on annuitisation they are shared more widely. Annuities are a collective risk through contracted insurance contracts, but these have become very expensive.
UK legislation now allows for a different approach. The Pension Schemes Act 2015 enables sharing of risks by individual members through payment of collective benefits, the value of which could vary. However, the Government have chosen not to implement the 2015 provisions but, as has been explained, to bring forward in the Bill a more bespoke regime. The overlapping provisions are repealed. Can the Minister tell us what future plans there are, if any, for the remaining 2015 Bill provisions that have not been repealed? There may be none.
The impetus for the provisions in the Bill has come from Royal Mail and the CWU, which should be congratulated on their collaboration and determination. This development of course came in the circumstance of decisions to close the DB scheme. As we know, the structure of CDC involves pensions being set by reference to targets determined by actuaries. It is argued that CDC arrangements typically have better outcomes. This is in part due to economies of scale on investment and enabling a timeline on investment beyond the individual member. It is of course a feature of CDC that there are no guarantees on pension levels paid out on assets of the scheme. As the Minister said, there is no recourse to a sponsoring employer. Indeed, pension levels set by actuarially determined targets rather than binding targets require a robust communications effort to ensure that Royal Mail employees, in this case, are fully aware of what this all means.
However, numerous studies by academics and practitioners have concluded that CDC can give better outcomes when compared to DC plus either draw-down or annuitisation. We take some comfort from the fact that the CDC concept has the support, we understand, of both the CBI and the TUC. While novel in the UK, it has been operated by the Dutch and Danish systems, albeit not on identical terms, for a number of years.
As has been pointed out, and indeed acknowledged by the Minister, this is very much a framework Bill, with much detail to be filled in by regulations. These will have to cover extensive issues, from financing, fit and proper persons, scheme design, sustainability, actuarial valuations and much more. There is a need to understand the valuation timetable and the gap between asset valuation and changes to pensions to be paid. If there is not to be a buffer, what alternative headroom measures are envisaged?
What can the Minister tell us about the tax regime which will operate and how auto-enrolment will work? Will it require changes to primary legislation? In relation to the SIs and the information that will come forward, can the Minister tell us when this will be available? I think she said by Committee, but that is actually very soon. I wonder how much detail we will get if that is the timeframe. We would certainly welcome it by Committee, but it is often more usual to get it by Report. However, I do not want to deter the Minister or suggest that she spends her time on other matters.
One of the criticisms raised about CDCs is that they invariably generate intergenerational unfairness, with older members doing better at the expense of younger members. How does the Minister respond to that? As is often the case with pensions legislation, it is the things left undone, just as much as those included, on which judgments will be made.
A number of commentators have expressed disappointment that the opportunity has not been taken to implement the changes to auto-enrolment recommended by the 2017 review: namely, to extend the application to workers aged 18, and to remove the qualifying earnings deduction and the earnings threshold. As NOW: Pensions points out, all three of these would help to narrow the gender pensions gap. Is it not time that we got to grips with the self-employed issue?
I am told that the Tory party manifesto, which I have not read, contained a promise to sort out the net pay anomaly. I would welcome that, but do not know whether the Minister has an update on the timeframe. I acknowledge the efforts of a group of professionals, prompted by the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, in engaging with HMRC to that end.
One further disappointment is the lack of a consolidator regime. It is suggested that superfunds will provide a new and affordable option to enable schemes to consolidate—although, like CDCs, they would require a robust authorisation and supervisory regime. We trust that the Minister, Mr Opperman, has not spent all his capital on CDCs.
Some of these powers are very wide. For example, Clause 28(3) on page 18 seems to allow the Secretary of State to define significant events entirely as he pleases. In Clause 18, on the calculation of benefits, subsection (4) seems to give power to change the very substance of any CMPB scheme. Is this to do with the need to safeguard intergenerational fairness within the scheme? If not, what is it for, how is intergenerational fairness to be protected and why does such provision not appear to be in the Bill? What is to prevent transfers out of the older members with large sums, to the clear detriment of their younger colleagues who remain? Does not the absence of a requirement for a capital buffer make this situation even worse, as the ABI’s excellent briefing note suggests?
In the context of powers given to make regulations, I would highlight subsections (6) and (7) of Clause 36, which appear to give the Minister unlimited discretion on how schemes may be restructured in the case of continuity option 1, while Clause 47(5) appears to be a fully-grown, entirely naked Henry VIII power. I am sure that the House will want to consider this provision carefully. Finally on delegated powers, we will want to discuss Clause 51, especially subsection (2), which again seems to confer unfettered power. We will also want to discuss Clause 31, dealing with triggering events, especially as it might concern eventually the withdrawal of a significant employer from a multi-employer scheme.
I am sorry if all this has sounded rather negative, as I am sure it has. Perhaps I should conclude my remarks on Part 1 by saying again that we enthusiastically support the idea of a CMPB scheme. We are, however, very concerned about the number and scope of the delegated powers that Part 1 contains and the absence of any drafts. I am grateful to the Minister for his commitment to provide the House with notes on what all these SIs hope to achieve, but that is not the same as being able to scrutinise draft legislation. I hope that we will have the opportunity to meet between now and Committee to discuss these issues further.
Part 3 deals with the Pensions Regulator, which I see was busy this morning exercising its powers by fining its fellow regulator, the FCA—only £2,000. We welcome the increase in the scope and strength of the regulator’s powers. My only general comment is to wonder whether the proposed penalties are sufficiently large to provide effective deterrence and to change behaviour. Clause 112, in inserting new Section 77A into the Pensions Act 2004, specifies a maximum penalty of £50,000 for failure to comply with Sections 72 to 75 of that Act. How was this limit arrived at? I think I heard the Minister explain that it was to parallel a limit elsewhere. What consultation or modelling took place to determine whether it would have effect?
In Clause 115, there is a new £1 million upper bound on penalties related to Section 88 of the Pensions Act 2004. The same clause, as the Minister remarked, gives the Secretary of State the power by regulation to increase this amount. No new upper bound is specified in the Bill. Is it wise to give such unlimited and potentially draconian powers to the Secretary of State? In any case, the House will want to know how the original limit of £1 million was set and what consultation or modelling took place. The provision to raise the £1 million limit without restriction and without further scrutiny not only seems rather dangerous but suggests a clear lack of confidence that the original limit will work. I can see why that might be so, given the resources of some of those on whom the penalty may fall, but surely it would be better to have in the Bill an original limit that we thought might work. We will want to come back to this in Committee, but I would be grateful for the Minister’s thoughts on the matter.
I also note that the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, who I do not think is in his place, has a Private Member’s Bill which proposes among other things to require the consent of pensions trustees before dividends are paid. I hope we may see amendments in Committee that allow us to discuss what may be an interesting proposal.
I now turn to Part 4, dealing with the pensions dashboards. I note that there is an obvious and obviously increasing need to provide better information and guidance about pensions, particularly pension draw-downs. This need has grown substantially since we last discussed it in the Chamber during the passage of the Financial Guidance and Claims Bill. Since then, FCA data suggests that over 645,000 pensions have been accessed, with only 15% believed to have had a Pension Wise appointment before accessing their benefits. More than half of the pensions accessed by savers for the first time between April 2018 and March 2019 saw the saver withdraw the maximum amount. This has all the hallmarks of a not-so-slow motion disaster, and the best remedy is more information, more advice and more guidance.
We agree that the pensions dashboard is a very important part of this, especially since auto-enrolment has brought an additional 10 million people into saving for a pension and, alarmingly, one in five adults admits to having lost track of a pension pot. The latest PPI research indicates that £19 billion has gone astray in this way. The dashboard, or dashboards, will help relocate this huge amount.
The question in my mind is whether it should be “dashboard” singular or “dashboards” plural. Should it be a dashboard provided only by MaPS, or should it be many dashboards, provided by MaPS and other qualified organisations? On the assumption that there will be very tight restrictions on how dashboard information is presented, and that future projections will not be allowed much variation, I see the merit in multiple dashboards. It seems to me that the key argument is one of reach. Allowing many dashboards will get more people to take notice and use dashboards. Restricting dashboards to MaPS risks a much smaller take-up. This has an analogue in Pension Wise, a superb service taken up historically by far too few people.
But there is more to helping the consumer than the dashboard. The increase in scams and unwise transfers connected to pension draw-downs is of urgent and increasing concern. Last week, the Times reported that the FCA had written to financial advisers warning against unsafe recommendations of transfers out of DB schemes, and last Saturday the front-page headline in the FT read:
“FCA urged to probe pension … advice”
with the sub-heading
“fears over fresh mis-selling scandal”.
The article noted that the regulator planned to write to 1,841 financial advisers about “potential harm” in their DB transfer advice. That is 76% of all advisory firms.
Noble Lords may remember that I, the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, proposed a simple default guidance draw-down mechanism, Amendment 24, during Report stage of the Financial Guidance and Claims Bill. The House passed this amendment by a majority of 80 or so. The Commons substituted its own version, which we accepted, perhaps a little reluctantly. This Commons version is now Sections 18 and 19 of the Act. They delegate the design of a “nudge” to the FCA, the industry, the DWP and MaPS.
As a result, there are now in the field two pilot tests. Both have the aim of delivering a nudge to guidance at the point at which someone wishes to access their pension pot, with a view to making receiving guidance a social norm. The trials will run for three months or so, and MaPS has said that it will publish a report on the outcome in spring 2020. This is quite a long time from October 2017, when we passed Amendment 24. Could I encourage the Minister to see whether this process could be accelerated? Government definitions of spring have been known to extend to July, sometimes in the same year.
More importantly, can the Minister say how the results of the trial will be judged? I do not mean one trial against the other; what absolute levels of take-up or behavioural change will be considered large enough to trigger a full-scale national rollout? I note that the Long Title to this Bill is simply to
“Make provision about pension schemes.”
This seems to me to allow scope for the reintroduction of Amendment 24 if the trials fail to produce the right result. This is certainly something we will want to consider as the Bill proceeds.
Again, we very much support the intentions of this Bill. I stress again how important we think it is that we see the draft regulations for Part 1 before Committee.
The next part of the Bill strengthens the powers of the Pensions Regulator, especially in relation to corporate transactions, which is greatly to be welcomed. However, I cannot help feeling that there is a missed opportunity to do more here. Recent high-profile failures, such as Carillion and BHS, went under with significant pension fund deficits after shareholders had taken substantial sums out of the companies; for example, Carillion consistently paid out dividends in the range of £50 million to £75 million a year, while at the same time the pension deficit grew from less than £100 million to over £600 million. In the year to March 2018, FTSE 100 companies with DB schemes paid £84 billion in dividends, compared with £8.2 billion repairing their deficits—a ratio of over 10 times. For FTSE 350 companies with DB schemes, the median ratio of dividends to deficit reduction contributions is even higher, at 14.2 times, and is growing. The Pensions Regulator itself has said:
“We are concerned about the growing disparity between dividend growth and stable deficit reduction payments. Recent corporate failures have highlighted the risk of long recovery plans while payments to shareholders are excessive relative to deficit repair contributions.”
It would be tempting simply to prevent companies with pension fund deficits from paying dividends at all, but commercial reality is not that simple. Stopping a company paying dividends might actually make its financial position less stable as markets react badly and the cost of capital increases. Deficits can be short-term, and the payment of a dividend may have no material adverse impact on the position of the pension fund. We should also remember where dividends go; much goes into pension funds. There is a balance to find here. However, we could move that balance to strengthen the position of pension funds relative to shareholder returns. Clause 103 in Part 3 goes some way in this direction, but we could do more to safeguard scheme members.
The noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, mentioned the Bill that the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, introduced to make it a requirement for trustees and the regulator to approve the distribution of dividends, which I support. This important protection could easily be covered in this Bill, at least in part, simply by including the declaration of a dividend as a notifiable event under Clause 109, to be treated in the same way as any other relevant corporate transaction. I would welcome the thoughts of the Minister on this.
Related to this, we have heard about delegated powers in this Bill, but one that jumps out at me, where the Bill and the Explanatory Memorandum are somewhat less than clear, is what will actually constitute a notifiable event in Clause 109. The Explanatory Notes refer simply to,
“circumstances to be prescribed by regulations.”
It seems odd that such an important, even headline, element of the Bill is left completely to be dealt with by future regulation. It would clearly be better to put what is intended into the Bill. Perhaps the Minister could clarify what notifiable events will in fact include and why that cannot be included in the Bill. At least, could the regulations be published before Committee, as with those from Part 1, which she mentioned earlier?
My next point relates to pensions dashboards. I wholeheartedly welcome them. As someone who is rapidly approaching his crucial 55th birthday and trying to work out what to do about pension funds from various past employers, having all the information in one place will be of great benefit. In fact, I am probably one of the one in five to whom the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, referred. My fear, however, is that those funds that are oldest and hardest to find will be the very ones that do not end up on the dashboard. How do the Government propose to ensure that all funds can be added to dashboards in a reasonable timescale? Also, importantly, will the state pension entitlements be included in the dashboard?
Finally, the Bill makes some welcome changes to transfer rights, but it does not address the important underlying issue of how transfer values themselves are calculated. I greatly recommend an article in the Sunday Times by Louise Cooper on 27 October, from the last time we were about to look at the Bill, which sets out the problem very clearly. She gives the example of a fund that will pay an inflation-linked pension of £4,000 a year. The transfer value that she was quoted from that fund for that £4,000 a year is £130,000. An annuity providing the same benefits would cost £240,000: nearly double the transfer value.
This chimes with my experience of looking into consolidating a small pension from an old DB scheme. The differences between transfer values and annuity prices are so large that, intuitively, someone must be profiteering here. While the law requires advice to be taken before the transfer of funds over £30,000, there seems to be no legal way to ensure fairness in respect of the transfer valuation itself—how it is calculated. I imagine that consumers may be losing out substantially. It would be good to hear the Minister’s thoughts on that as well.
I am pleased that Clause 7 requires the authorisation of these schemes and that Clauses 11 to 17 suggest that there will be criteria but, as other noble Lords have said, we need to know what those criteria are and what attention will be paid to a situation where authorisation is withdrawn, as proposed in Clause 26. We also need to know what provisions we need to put in place at this stage if the scheme needs to wind up and members’ pensions must be raided to cover the costs of the wind-up, to make sure that members do not end up with no pension—as could happen in theory, although I hope not in practice. We need some more robust underpinning and assets set aside to cover the cost of a wind-up, or some kind of insurance could be embedded in the Pension Protection Fund.
Having seen this before, I know that there are risks. So what risk margins will be retained for future market falls? This is particularly relevant to Clause 25 where members will apparently have a right to transfer their benefits, but these are not accrued pension rights. They do not have accrued rights to an income. So what reserving requirements and risk margins need to be applied to members who want to transfer out on the basis of their rights to a particular portion of the fund today, which may then leave future members and those who do not transfer out—those who are trusting the scheme, if you like—at risk of having reduced pensions later on because those who transfer out today took more than they would ultimately have been entitled to?
Part 3 deals with the regulator’s powers. I fully support the idea of giving the regulator extra powers—its statutory duty to protect scheme benefits is certainly important—such as the power to intervene sooner and the power to demand information. At the moment, the regulator can ask for information but it must use its powers before it can require that, so I warmly welcome this measure.
The aim is to focus on forcing employers to fund these schemes in full but, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, and others, the annuity costs of these schemes are way beyond the ongoing costs of running them. So the ongoing funding and the technical provisions of these schemes are well below what would be required in buying out with an annuity. Even certain billionaires have been allowed to walk away without meeting Section 75 debt. Just paying an initial starting pension means that the future pensions will be lower, which recognises some of the problems that exist in the annuity market today as a result of quantitative easing and its impact on the cost of buying so-called secure or risk-free long-term assets.
I support the aims, but perhaps my noble friend will consider whether we need to look at the issue of Section 75 debt as well because it is imposing draconian costs. I want particularly to raise the issue of the plumbing pension scheme. In this case, employers are being asked to pay money they do not have without selling their own homes and losing everything they have built up over their entire lives in order to fund Section 75 debts for an event that they were never warned about, which is their retirement and which apparently crystallised these debts, and yet the scheme is supposedly fully funded. There has been no deficit recovery and all the dues have been paid. I urge my noble friend to facilitate a meeting to discuss this issue and consider whether some of these problems can be dealt with in the Bill.
I fully support the aim of having a pensions dashboard, but I fear that the Government have severely underestimated the challenge facing the Money and Pensions Service in delivering any kind of comprehensive pensions dashboard. It needs to include charges and the information that members would actually like to see, as called for by Which?, but the Bill seems to imply that the Government believe that the existing regulatory framework will provide appropriate consumer protection. I have serious concerns about that. There are more than 12 pension regimes with different subsets of those regimes, legacy schemes which have guaranteed annuity rates, protected tax-free cash and death benefits. All of these need to be identified on a dashboard before members decide whether they want to transfer money or consolidate their benefits. We need to make provision for that.
There are masses of manual records in the depths of life assurance companies and pensions administrators, so I fear that the powerful financial institutions may not wholly support the dashboard, especially those which have bought closed books of past pensions. The cost of transferring millions of partial manual records on to a platform on an electronic database has not been adequately appreciated. I would therefore welcome my noble friend asking her department to consider mandating the simple statements that are currently being consulted on. These could be sent out to everyone in a standard format as the very minimum requirement to facilitate a comprehensive dashboard, regardless of whether they are immediately provided in an electronic format. The Money and Pensions Service could work together with the consultation team to make sure that a dashboard-compliant annual statement is produced so that the data can be merged. Of course, any commercial pensions dashboard needs to be properly regulated and authorised. I have severe concerns about this being used as a marketing tool, which may not be in the best interests of the members.
There is also the issue of DB funding and transfer rights, along with the allied problem of scams. Of course we must put duties on trustees and managers to facilitate transfers where members want them, but I support what the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, was saying about how best to protect those members who have potentially fallen for a scam, which is usually the result of a cold call, against transferring their pensions out of the scheme and then regretting it later. Perhaps we could put conditions on the transfer rights that would ideally trigger an automatic referral to Pension Wise. Its representatives could go through questions with the individual to help identify whether it is likely to be a scam. Or, at the very least, it would require the trustees to ask those questions themselves, which to be fair are not that many, such as, “Are you trying to transfer out as the result of a cold call? Do you know the people who are recommending you to transfer? Do you know anything about the scheme that you want to transfer to?” Those would raise red flags and thus would immediately help to protect members from what we all want to ensure does not happen. We must not forget how many hundreds of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is in these pension schemes from the tax relief they receive over the years. That money was given to make sure we do not have problems of having to support poor pensioners.
I implore my noble friend to look at a couple of other issues dear to my heart; I know a number of other noble Lords have alluded to them. Number one is the problem of net pay pension schemes and whether we can put in this Bill a duty on trustees and the regulator to ensure that any member automatically enrolled in a pension scheme is enrolled in one that is suitable for them—in other words, not one that charges the lowest earners 25% extra for their pension, which a net pay pension scheme currently does. Finally, there is an issue with the National Health Service Pension Scheme. It might be worth pursuing whether we can look at putting any of this problem into this Bill to help sort out on the scheme-pays side for the NHS.
I stress that I welcome this Bill. I am delighted that we are looking at all the measures in it; it is a very large piece of legislation. I look forward to hearing from my noble friend and to discussing it further in Committee.
Part 5 provides for more enforceable scheme funding standards. One important supporting amendment—referenced by the noble Lord, Lord Vaux—was also captured well by the Government Actuary in evidence to the Work and Pensions Select Committee. The committee’s report said that
“the average ratio of deficit recovery contributions to dividends has declined”
over the last five years for FTSE 350 companies, meaning that more than half of these companies paid out
“Ten times more … to shareholders”
than to their DB pension scheme—largely due to the significant increase in dividends over the period, without a similar increase in contributions.
Financial technology can deliver a pensions dashboard and make a real difference to savers, finding their lost pots and allowing them to see in one place their total pensions savings, state and private, to assist them in making important decisions. A finder service could search the records of all schemes to identify data matched to an individual, which could be presented to the individual to view, transforming accessibility for more than 22 million people. But public good cannot be traded off against commercial interests. Notwithstanding future government decisions on commercial dashboards, there must be a public good dashboard, the governance, control and ownership of which must be with a public body.
The CEO of the Pensions Regulator appeared to be with me in that view, and he emphasised to the Work and Pensions Select Committee on 25 June 2019 that
“there must be a public dashboard.”
It would be extraordinary if the Government compelled all private, public and state schemes to release the data of over 22 million individuals and £7.6 trillion of pensions assets, when individuals can access their own data only in the commercial marketplace because the Government have denied them access to a safe space in a public good dashboard.
The public are with me on this. Surveys of public attitudes conducted by the Money Advice Service, the DWP, the ABI, ComRes and others all found that the public wanted an accessible public good dashboard, publicly owned, which they would trust more than a commercial dashboard. The DWP feasibility study on dashboards in December 2018 stated that
“evidence would suggest that starting with a single, non-commercial dashboard … is likely to reduce the potential for confusion and help to establish consumer trust.”
In April 2019, in response to the consultation, the Government altered their view and referred to simultaneous testing of commercial dashboards and an openness to further functionality, taking multiple dashboards beyond their initial find and view purpose. The impact assessment states:
“Option 2: Government to legislate: (the preferred option). Government supports the coordination of an industry-led dashboard … This will lead to the creation of dashboard service designed, developed and owned by industry, facilitated by Government”.
This is a remarkable statement. There is no public dashboard mentioned, only a commercially owned pensions “dashboard ecosystem”, with no limit on its functionality. There is a reference tucked away in paragraph 50 to the industry being expected to create a non-commercial dashboard—a loose expectation, undefined.
Equal in importance to ownership is consumer protection. The provisions in Part 4 are far too weak. As Which? argued in its briefing,
“it is absolutely crucial that there are strong regulations in place to prevent potential harm against consumers from the misuse of commercial dashboards by providers. The bill does not go far enough to mitigate against this harm, and should be amended.”
The Bill must establish a high bar for consumer protection at the heart of the dashboard which hardwires the best interests of the savers and the resolution of conflicts of interest in the sole interests of members and beneficiaries. Transactional dashboards should not be allowed without further legislation; they open up a new market, with very significant potential for consumer detriment. We need to understand market and consumer behaviour, with legislation being brought forward before dashboards become transactional.
As has been mentioned, there is also public interest in data standards, the information to be provided, how it is presented, who can hold it and how, and so on. A priority is getting schemes’ basic data fit for release—for many it is not—but demands for further information will come, such as where investments are held and whether they align with the Paris Agreement on climate change.
If the Government compel the release of the data of 20 million to 30 million individuals to commercially owned dashboards, while simultaneously denying the public the right to access their own data through a public good dashboard not owned by the industry, and failing to implement a tough consumer protection regime, then they will fail in their obligation to millions of people. The technology is great and it should be available to people, but in a way that protects their interests.
Efficient ways for workers to share risk are to be welcomed. The Bill allows these collective money purchase schemes to be set up by a single employer or group of connected employers. However, like master trusts, these CMPSs will have to meet a financial sustainability requirement and demonstrate that they have sufficient financial resources to run the scheme for a period of time in the event of a scheme failure, such as employer insolvency and a loss of contributing members, administrative failure or removal of authorisation. As the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, referenced, it is important to probe how this protection will work and the extent to which the employer who set up the CMP scheme has to financially contribute to the sustainability requirement. This is the issue not of funding the benefits, but of resources to manage a potential failure in a CMP scheme.
I am conscious of the time, so I will be brief. I completely support the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, in her campaigning on the way the tax system can really disadvantage not only consultants but a large number of low-paid women. I was disappointed that the Bill does not address the gender pension gap. I compliment her on the work she has done, but I want to raise an issue that I keep raising: I will take advantage of my last minute to do so again.
There should be a carer’s credit paid through the social security system towards a private pension, complementing the carer’s credit in the state pension system. Prior to the flat rate state pension introduced in 2016, carers were credited with entitlements in both the first-tier basic state pension and the second-tier state second pension. Now that the second-tier has been totally transferred to the private pension, carer’s credit should not be lost. Prior to 2016, public policy accepted that caring was an economic contribution credited for the first and second-tier pension. Until that crediting is rightly restored, our reforms will have disadvantaged carers.
What is the role of the viability statement in this regard? Is it a specific matter to be reported to the regulator, and, if not, why not? Will schemes be expected to have provisions for lock-in periods or redemption windows? The questions now being asked about investment fund redemptions, following the run on the illiquid Woodford funds, are mirrored here—with the slant, as the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, and others, have pointed out, that the older generation has the whip hand. I agree very much with the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, that these new schemes are a halfway house. Something is missing, some kind of capital provision or buffer so that when there is trouble, there is something to call on, rather than seeing those still in the scheme left in the lurch by those old enough to do a runner.
Turning to penalties, I found 20 recitations to do with the new collective scheme, when only the small civil penalties under Section 10 of the Pensions Act 1995 can be invoked. Some of these things deserve greater penalties, especially if done repeatedly or deliberately: for example, not taking actuarial advice; not getting valuations; not carrying out a continuity strategy; not properly dealing with the discharge of liabilities and winding up; or not dealing with directions regarding failures. Seriously, should the maximum fines for what could be pretty egregious omissions really be just £5,000 for an individual or £50,000 for companies?
While researching, I looked at the recent fines levied on the regulator’s website. They were all smaller than the Section 10 maximums. I raised an eyebrow at the FCA pension scheme’s fine, but today’s Times says that the £2,000 fine is the highest possible fine for lack of information to members in a chair’s report. Irrespective of what fine the FCA merited, it is another pretty derisory maximum for what could be a serious lack of information provided to members. These fines are lower than the cost of taking advice on whether you have got your report right. What kind of incentive is it to get your report right?
Elsewhere in the Bill, there are new escalating fines for failing to provide information or allow site inspections. Of course, by that stage things will have got pretty serious, but should the escalating concept be widened for repeat offences and more serious matters related to the viability or stability of a scheme? Early warnings are key, before things get to notifiable or dangerous status. Also, can the Pensions Regulator remove persistent repeat offenders on the basis that they are no longer fit and proper persons? We found out from the FCA’s report on the GRG that removing people as fit and proper was not all that easy, because they put lots of other rules around it that were not necessarily infringed. So what is the situation with the Pensions Regulator and that possibility?
Going up in amounts, of course I note the new £1 million fine that the regulator will be able to apply in what are the worst instances of behaviour around deficit matters in defined benefit schemes, or providing false and misleading information. But this is way too small for all circumstances, given the deficits revealed with BHS—Philip Green eventually put back £363 million of the £571 million deficit, which was just about his dividends, but we are still way off—and £2.6 billion for Carillion. Last year, the UK’s direct benefit pension scheme deficit increased by another £60 billion to £260 billion. Companies with deficits are continuing to increase dividends significantly, without pro-rata repayment of deficit. I, too, welcome the initiative the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, is taking on this matter.
Against that background, £1 million looks like an affordable cost of doing business for larger organisations. I consider that it would be relevant to apply fines that match, for example, a multiple of the unpaid deficit, or based on turnover, such as the fines for offending against the GDPR or competition law. Putting employees’ pensions at risk or raiding the public purse via the Pension Protection Fund is egregious behaviour and deserves no less penalty than those other policy areas where larger fines can be levied. There are precedents beyond financial services, which are behind the game on what fines should be for egregious matters.
I realise that there are new criminal offences and there is always nervousness about them, especially by the people who probably never risk being caught by them. We have to try to make them work against the people we need to catch, but we know how difficult it can be to prove mens rea in the collective decision-making of the corporate environment. Frankly, I think that prosecutors and judges can recognise wrongdoing when they see it and so I do not take so strongly as the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, the cautions in this regard.
Finally, I come to the pensions dashboard. Yes, it is a good idea to have somewhere where you can access all your information. I have already done some of the voluntary ones on platforms where I have got pensions—I have filled things in and got things popping out at the other end—but, in the longer term, there are lots of ideas around these things that we are thinking of. There is the nudge effect that such dashboards can have on encouraging more savings into pensions. Commercial platforms enabling you to act on the nudge may well be more successful than just getting a message to save more somewhere. For example, it may turn out that banks are better placed to nudge regularly as people log-in online to banks more frequently, and there is already the open banking experience to model upon.
The noble Baroness, Lady Drake, is right: we have to take great care when we introduce any kind of transactional dashboard. Even before that, whatever the rules say, once there is a dashboard other people will come along with their dashboard, which may not be a qualifying dashboard. So we have to make sure that we can catch scammers and other dashboards where you catch your own data, because they will not fall within the rules of a non-qualifying platform.
You cannot rely on entities being regulated. We have had plenty of experience of highly regulated entities, such as banks, where wrongdoing has not been caught because the activity itself was not regulated. For example, again with GRG, the FCA report says that it was unable to act against bankers because the activity of commercial lending is unregulated. So the only way to catch perpetrators who in some way abuse the concept of dashboards is for dashboard activity—whatever it is in a wider sense—to be regulated in a widely defined way so that regulators can act. It is just too risky to leave wriggle room with matters as precious as people’s pensions.
I have a few queries, which my noble friend might like to address in a letter if that is more convenient. Over the weekend, I logged on to the Pensions Dashboard Prototype Project, which I found informative, but right at the end it said:
“The industry and government hope to have Pensions Dashboard services ready by 2019.”
That sounds as if folk will already be able to access the service, but they cannot.
Reading the response to the consultation document, we are told:
“Once the supporting infrastructure and consumer protections are in place, and data standards and security are assured, most pension schemes should be ready to provide consumer’s information to them within three to four years.”
Even that rather long timescale is qualified by the words “most” and “should”. This project has been on the stocks for some time, and I wonder whether we really have to wait that long for this. If we do, perhaps somebody might amend the wording on the website as it is seriously misleading.
My second query is about the identity service referred to in Clause 119(3). The government response says:
“Before the pension search can take place, the identity service will authenticate the user to an accepted standard.”
The Explanatory Notes state:
“For example, the regulations may provide that ID verification must be completed before any information is provided”.
As I understand it, that means one has to register with a service such as Verify in order to get the digital key that unlocks access to this new service.
Last year, the NAO issued a very critical report on Verify:
“GDS reported a verification success rate of 48% at the beginning of February 2019, against a 2015 projection of 90%.”
GDS is the Government Digital Service. I tried to access Verify and was rejected by two before I succeeded with the third of the six private sector authenticators. Government support for Verify ends this March, with the hope that the private sector will take over. Is my noble friend satisfied that those who want to access the dashboard will not be deterred by the at times cumbersome and unreliable identity services?
My third query is about the many pension schemes where the widow, widower or partner has benefits when the principal beneficiary dies. Will those “secondary” beneficiaries be able to access their entitlement under the principal’s scheme both before and after the principal has died? If the objective is to give people a good idea of what their pension will be and whether they need to make additional provision, that information is essential if they are to get a complete picture. There may be data protection issues, but I think that this issue needs addressing and I hope that my noble friend will be able to say something about it.
It is not clear—this point was raised by my noble friend Lady Altmann—whether the information will include charges and income projection figures. To be meaningful, both should be included. Presumably, schemes will not be able to make their own heroic assumptions about projections. Can the Minister confirm that there will be a standardised methodology for projections?
Next, equity release is becoming an increasingly important component of retirement planning. A person’s equity might be worth far more than their pension pot and be capable of providing an income stream in retirement. I do not want to suggest anything that might slow down the rollout of the dashboard, but is it being configured in such a way that it will be possible downstream to incorporate the savings locked up in equity as well as the savings locked up in the pension pot, together with potential income streams?
My final query relates to the use of “pensions dashboards” in the plural—a point raised by other noble Lords. If I were mischievous, I would table an amendment to delete “dashboards” and insert “dashboard” in the singular in Clause 118. I assume, incidentally, that there will be no charge for access to any dashboard, and perhaps that might be made explicit in the Bill.
As a Conservative, I am in favour of competition and choice, but I asked myself why we need more than one dashboard, particularly as under Clause 122 the Money and Pensions Service will be obliged to provide one itself. Of course, the same information will be available to all dashboards, and designing and setting one up will involve providers in considerable expense, with no revenue. The excellent Library briefing refers to the industry’s concern about the costs of establishing a dashboard.
I see a parallel with the directory enquiry service. That was abolished in 2003 and replaced with a bewildering array of no fewer than 20 118 schemes. I am not convinced that competition and plurality has always been a worthwhile innovation. Any mischief on my part might be avoided if any dashboard had to be regulated by the FCA—as suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Drake—to make sure that it was compliant.
As a postscript, can my noble friend shed some light on the recent support of the Pensions Minister for a new pensions commission, as suggested by the Fabian Society and Bright Blue?
Having said all that, I welcome the Bill and hope that it might reach the statute book before too long.