Clause 2 - Membership of the Regulator
Pensions Bill
10:15 am
Mr Nigel Waterson (Eastbourne, Conservative)
This is a slightly disparate group of amendments. Amendment No. 104 would take away
from the Secretary of State the power under 2(1)(c) to appoint the five other members of the board of the regulator and give it to the chairman with the final approval of the Secretary of State. This is a small but important shift in the balance. A similar point is made in amendments Nos. 108 and 109 and Nos. 113 to 118, and a slightly different point is made in amendment No. 120, to which I shall return.
We argue that the Government cannot have it both ways. We support the setting up of the regulator, as I have already made clear. We can all agree that the regulator and the role of the PPF should be entirely independent. The regulator should be free to roam widely, with its powers and its duties to do its best for the resources that it is given, without fear of political interference at any level. The Government are presumably making a virtue of the fact that the PPF—and, I suspect, the regulator—will be watchdogs with teeth, which they will be willing to use, and will be free from any Government influence. That is as it should be. It has been made abundantly clear by Ministers that the Government are not standing behind the new fund—the PPF—we shall talk about that in much more detail, and at some length, in due course. Those organisations, including the regulator, are free-standing.
In the Government of which the Minister is a member, there is a trend for people to be control freaks, and not be able to let go—although I except the Minister from that accusation. Not only does the Secretary of State have his fingerprints all over the Bill, so does the Treasury. I have made the point before, but it is no less valid for that: the Department for Work and Pensions is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Treasury. The Chancellor likes to indulge in micro-management of almost everything in our daily lives; this matter, I fear, is no exception.
No doubt there will be an exhaustive and high-level procedure to recruit the best possible chairman for the new regulator—someone with exceptional qualities. The same goes for the chief executive. The chairman is to be appointed by the Secretary of State. We are content with that; like the creation of the world, the process has to start somewhere; the regulator cannot just appear out of the clouds.