Clause 13
Pensions Bill
5:30 pm
David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
I am not sure whether I understood the hon. Gentleman’s point. He wants the new body to do the kind of costings work that the Pensions Commission did. That is a very good idea, and I welcome it. I notice that despite the excellent work of the Pensions Commission, the Government have been using all sorts of numbers for the cost of different policy options. Sometimes, apparently, the citizen’s pension will cost £9 billion; the other day, the Secretary of State started the Second Reading debate by saying that it would cost £10 billion; by the latter stages of the debate, it was something between £20 billion and £30 billion. The debate needs to be informed by something better than the Secretary of State pulling figures from the air.
I urge that we do not get too hung up on whether we spend a million quid on a few people doing such work. If the prize of that cost was some kind of future coherence and stability for our pension system, which involves the investment and allocation of hundreds of billions of pounds, spending that bit of money for a few people to oversee the system would look like the biggest bargain possible.
In a helpful briefing note issued last year, the Pensions Policy Institute set out different options for establishing a commission. It set out four types: a general advisory commission, one that would make recommendations, one that would set policy and one that would be for public information purposes. What we have in mind is definitely not simply a public information role such as that of the New Zealand Retirement Commission, and certainly not a policy-setting role that would oblige the Government to act in particular ways. We have in mind a commission with a general advisory role that might well make recommendations, on which it would ultimately be for the Government and Parliament to make a decision.
It is a pity that the Government have not taken on board that important proposal from the Pensions Commission. They have adopted a lot of the Pensions Commission’s report and worked hard to secure the consensus that we have so far. There have been bogus arguments about quangos and more serious arguments about Governments not liking to give away power—they do not like to be criticised by outside bodies or hear that means-testing or some other controversial aspect of policy is not working. I detect a disappointing tendency on the part of the Government to run back to the usual element of pensions policy, which is to keep it in the hands of the Government of the day and one party. That has not proved a successful way of running the pensions policy of this country since the magnificent Liberal Government of 1909.