Written Evidence to be reported to the House
Pensions Bill
12:00 pm
Stephen Haddrill: The problem arises from European legislation—you are quite right. We think that the best possible solution is to persuade the European Commission and our partners in Europe to change the legislation. We think that the Government should strenuously pursue that because the European legislation was designed to promote a single market—cross-border trade. This has nothing to do with cross-border trade, and while the Government have a difficulty in that probably no other member state has this problem, that should, I think, be taken as an advantage, since no other member state would necessarily oppose what we want to do here. I therefore think that vigorous pursuit of that is very important.
Beyond that, the insurance industry does pursue what we call streamlined joining—techniques to encourage people to join a group personal pension through an e-joining mechanism, through face-to-face joining being arranged by the provider, and so on—with simplified forms and simplified letters. We get a high level of take-up when that is done by the companies, so we feel that streamlined joining should be allowed. Where that is taking place, the employer should have an exemption from having to set up a personal account, which would bring in complexity and the likelihood of levelling down.