Written Evidence to be reported to the House.
Pensions Bill
1:15 pm
Nick Ainger (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire, Labour)
On the risk of levelling down, in the paper that you submitted to the Committee, you indicated that you had undertaken a survey in February 2007, covering 336 schemes with 2.1 million members. In the survey, did you ask the employers whether the 3 per cent. level would encourage them, irrespective of where we go with conditional indexation, to change their existing occupational pensions? If only part of their work force was covered by their own scheme, were they concerned that the introduction of the new scheme would increase their administrative costs and so on? Therefore, was that another encouragement for them to switch from a more generous scheme—from their point of view, in terms of their contributions—to the 3 per cent. scheme? I hope that that was not a rambling question.