Pensions Bill
10:30 pm
Nigel Waterson (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Eastbourne, Conservative)
I associate myself with the Minister’s remarks about you, Mr. Gale, and your co-Chairman, Mr. David Taylor. I am sure that you will both bring to the chairmanship of the Committee your usual rigour and occasional good humour.
I am delighted to be ably backed up, assisted and supported by my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire, and indeed my other colleagues. I take this opportunity to welcome all members of the Committee, pressed men and volunteers. I am tempted to say that they do not know they are born. Some of us bear the scars not only of the Pensions Act 2004 but even the 1995 Act, to go back a bit. As a fresh-faced Back Bencher, I was put on that Committee—I think to punish me for some long-forgotten sin—where I developed a taste for pensions legislation. It is nice to see some old faces here today—I mean that in the best sense—particularly among the officials.
Here we are again, trying to resolve the pensions crisis. The Government are perhaps the only body in the country who persist in claiming that there is no pensions crisis, but we are going to have a bite at that rather substantial cherry. The good news, as the Minister said, is that we have agreed an informal timetable for sittings, so we should be able comfortably to deliver the Bill by 5 o’clock on 8 February. That will be a massive step forward from the last Pensions Bill, which seemed to go on and on and on, primarily because the Government kept trying to amend their own Bill. I lost count, but I think that between the Commons and the Lords, the Government tabled about 1,500 amendments in the end.
We are proceeding on the basis that this Minister has a much better grip on things. It is worth putting on the record that at the Programming Sub-Committee he gave us a cast-iron guarantee that there would not be lots of amendments. Apart from the obvious technical and drafting amendments, which are understandable as long as they do not get out of hand, all the envisaged amendments of any substance are now before us. That is helpful, and it is on that basis that we will be able to deliver the Bill in 12 sittings. For those newcomers to the world of pensions legislation, I hope that we can deliver a few laughs, a few tears and some human interest, and that we can disagree without being disagreeable.
The Minister mentioned consensus, and it is important to understand what we mean by that. Unlike his TV appearances, the Committee will not provide an easy ride. The Conservatives have made it clear, as I for one did on Second Reading, that by consensus we mean total transparency and openness. As the official Opposition, we must be satisfied that the Bill will work, not just because that is the right thing to do for future generations of pensioners but because we have a sneaking suspicion that we might well be in power when a lot of it comes to be implemented.
The Minister has touched on the main issues. One is restoring the link between pensions and average earnings. That was in our last election manifesto, so it would be churlish of us to do anything but support it.