Clause 13 - Provision of information,
Pensions Bill
4:30 pm
Professor Steve Webb (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
It is hard to be against information, education and assistance, but we will have a go. An issue that the hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) often raises, to give him his due, is that of employers who are nervous about giving advice to their employees on pensions matters. Various rules about the giving of financial advice and about who can and cannot give it have scared them off.
Even if the employer runs a very good scheme and puts a lot of money into it, and even if he does so in a robust industry where everything is rosy, he cannot say to his workers, ''It's a good bet; you'd be well advised to go for it.'' The hon. Member for Cardiff, West is not with us, but if he were, he would already be on his feet to say, ''And look what happens when people do that.'' However, there is clearly a case for enabling employers to give their workers more advice about their occupational pension scheme. We know that even firms that run very good schemes with generous levels of employer contributions do not have 100 per cent. membership of those schemes. Life is never certain in pensions, but there are people working for such
employers in whose best interests it would almost certainly be to join the scheme, particularly in the world of the pension protection fund. At the moment, employers cannot even have a conversation with them about the matter.
How far will the clause enable the regulator—the bit on the open part of the wall—to support employers who want to say to their employees, ''We encourage you to join our occupational pension scheme''? To look back to an earlier discussion about the objectives of the regulator, one of those objectives is to promote schemes and occupational provisions. Surely one of the best ways to do that is to support employers who run good schemes in encouraging and informing their members about joining them. Will the Minister give the Committee a steer as to whether, under the clause, it is envisaged that the regulator will encourage and support employers who are currently frightened to talk to their workers about the company scheme for fear of being seen to give them advice, which they cannot do? Will that taboo be broken by the clause? If possible, we want employers to feel more confident about doing that. It is not clear to me whether that is something that the regulator would do under the clause.