Clause 18
Pensions Bill
2:15 pm
Nigel Waterson (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Eastbourne, Conservative)
The Minister says, right on cue, that they are. Well, we beg to disagree. Of course, there are areas of detail about personal accounts that it is inappropriate to go into here, Mr. Gale, as I am sure that you would be the first to remind us. However, we fear that there is a temptation into which Ministers are in danger of falling, and it is our job to help them not to fall into it. The temptation is to pass the legislation with a sigh of relief, then to pass the whole job over to some hot shots running the delivery authority and leave it to them to make all the difficult, tricky decisions. I would be the first to say that politicians are the last people we want running something like that in any detailed way. However, I think that it behoves us, particularly in view of the timeline involved with the reports, to nail down some clear ideas about the personal accounts system before we wave goodbye to the legislation.
As I said, I thought that the letter of 31 January betrayed a certain nervousness on the part of the Minister. In the second paragraph, it says that
“delivering and managing a major occupational pension scheme such as personal accounts... should not be a task for government.”
The answer to that, as I have tried to indicate, is yes and no. Of course, they are right, as the Minister goes on to say:
“We therefore propose to bring in experts to help develop and deliver the personal accounts scheme.”
He goes on to talk about the second pensions Bill later this year, and to stress the advisory nature of the delivery authority. That is all well and good, but to take one clear example before I move onto the weight of the amendments, he talks about
“advising on the design of the commercial strategy”.
As I have made clear in more than one speech, the Opposition hope that personal accounts will be a success, not only because they are the right approach to take to such a massive change in our systems, but because we may be the ones to inherit their implementation. We think that personal accounts have got to have the right shape, in a very general sense. I do not want the Minister to get too worried; we do not want to be too prescriptive, but we need to feel that the system is going to work. If it fails, and the accounts are not sufficiently attractive to the target audience—we shall come later to issues about whether the target group has changed—we want to do what we can to try to put that right now.