Written Evidence to be reported to the House
Pensions Bill
6:15 pm
Nigel Stanley: We would agree with that. Clearly, no one has built personal accounts before and I think that it should not require PADA and its successor to discover a big problem that comes back and then requires primary legislation, when really a more flexible regulation-making power would deal with that.
Our general perception of the Bill is that it is fairly flexible. There are lots of regulation-making powers. Sometimes people object to that in primary legislation, but I do not think anyone should in this, because there will be a need for some flexibility and for learning from experience. No one should underestimate what a difficult administrative task it is setting up personal accounts. There will undoubtedly be some lessons from that, and I would think that the more flexibility that there is in the system the better. We have used, for example, unforeseen outcomes already quite a lot. There may even be others—actually, we have tried to foresee them, but I am sure that there will be others that we have not foreseen yet. Having regulation-making powers will be helpful in dealing with that.