Clause 29 - Prohibition orders
Pensions Bill
10:30 am
Mr George Osborne (Tatton, Conservative)
Let me say from the outset that I would appreciate a stand part debate on this clause.
The clause prohibits a person from being a trustee of any scheme on the grounds that they are not a fit
and proper person. It contains a significant extension of the powers in the Pensions Act 1995, which restricts prohibition to serious and persistent breaches of specific parts of pensions law. The clause contains a much broader power to prohibit people who are not, in the view of the regulator, fit and proper persons.
Amendment No. 151 is intended to add urgency to subsection (2), the effect of which is to remove a trustee from a scheme. I want to add the word ''forthwith'' to make it clear that that should happen immediately. Perhaps the Minister could clarify whether that would be the case and whether it would happen the moment the decision to issue a prohibition order was made by the regulator or when the information was passed on to the trustee. When would removal take place?
Amendment No. 152 is slightly lengthier and would insert a new sentence. If a person were prohibited from being a trustee because they were not a fit and proper person, that could have an enormous impact on their professional, and possibly their private, life. If they were, for example, a finance director, being deemed not to be a fit and proper person to be a trustee could finish their career. One hopes that a prohibition order would only be issued when it was justified. However, given that it is likely to have such a serious impact on someone's life, surely people must be given the chance to appeal.
As I understand it, under subsection (3) the appeal can only be made, in effect, to the regulator. Perhaps the Under-Secretary will tell me that the determinations panel makes the decision and that the regulator hears the appeal, or that the tribunal, which we will come to, hears the appeal. However, given the seriousness of a prohibition order's effect, a person should be given the option to get outside the system and to appeal beyond the organisation in its totality which is imposing the prohibition order.
That organisation might be prejudiced by the fact that it felt it necessary to issue the prohibition order in the first place. Amendment No. 152 would give the prohibited person the power to apply to the High Court to get a judicial review of the decision. The Under-Secretary may tell me that that can happen in any case and that a person has the right to apply to the High Court for a judicial review. However, I am not a lawyer so I thought that I would get him—or rather the lawyers who advise him—to explain that that is the case. It is important that someone in extremis should have the right to appeal against a decision to an organisation outside the structure of the regulator, its determinations panel and the tribunal.
Finally, amendment No. 150, which is a probing amendment, would remove subsection (5). It seems a strange and blanket provision that a revocation of a prohibition order
''cannot affect anything done before that time.''
What is meant by that?