Written Evidence to be reported to the House.
Pensions Bill
2:00 pm
Lord Turner: Let me start with the first question. I shall then see whether John or Jeannie want to add anything. Is there anything in the Bill that does not fit well with our proposals? Overall, the answer is no. It is a fairly complete enactment of what we proposed. The only areas where it has some potential divergence—it is potential rather than actual—is when problems have emerged that we did not anticipate. We did not get to the level of detail. We can come back to it later, but clearly the proposal that the Bill has an enabling power on the Secretary of State to exempt personal pensions from the need to auto-enrol was not something that we had anticipated. We had not realised at that stage that there might—indeed, probably will be—a problem under European law about auto-enrolling people into personal pensions. We can come back to our attitude to that specific issue later.
One other more minor point that was in our initial proposals but is not here relates to the conditions that make a scheme one that is valid to apply to rather than a personal accounts scheme. We envisaged that there would be a requirement for the level of contributions to be in excess of 8 per cent. and for the administrative costs to be below a certain percentage to ensure that, post the administration costs, the scheme would be at least as good as the national scheme.
Those are the only two areas in which there is a difference from what we anticipated. Are there any others that occur to you?