Clause 3
Pensions Bill
4:00 pm
Nigel Waterson (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Eastbourne, Conservative)
I am happy to out myself as someone who missed the boat on the last group of amendments, but I shall say a couple of things that I might have said in that context in this stand part debate. I have two points to make. First, the Minister has developed a mantra about auto-enrolment as if it were an everyday occurrence. Apart from the fact that he conceded that there is an issue of degree in any event, moving from however many he thinks are auto-enrolling at the moment in existing schemes to what is fervently hoped will be mass auto-enrolment of up to 10 million people under personal accounts is a very different kettle of fish. I think that we can all accept that.
The National Association of Pension Funds sent me some Department for Work and Pensions figures suggesting that only 3 per cent. of employers who are currently contributing 3 per cent. or more to pension schemes use auto-enrolment. I do not know quite how that reads across to the figures the Minister has quoted. I think he refers to Tesco. There seems to be a conflict of evidence there. In any event we would still argue that we are in a totally different ball game in terms of auto-enrolment under the Bill.
The other point is more an attempt to try to tidy up where we go from here on pay to save and means-testing generally. I appreciate that consensus building is unlikely to extend as far as giving the official Opposition credit for raising particular issues which have been adopted by the Government, but I am delighted to hear that while we were screaming about means-testing and its effect on personal accounts in a different part of the same forest Age Concern was saying much the same thing. It all comes to the same in the end. Again, I should like to welcome the discussions that are now foreseen by the Minister.
We did not support the Bill on Second Reading for precisely the reason that I have set out on means-testing. It is perhaps an indication of how far we have come and how quickly that we did not pursue the amendments and the new clause in the last group as a result of what the Minister said. It would have been the height of churlishness. I never like to think of myself as churlish; that may be alright for the Liberal Democrats, but not for us. Conservatives are not into churlishness in any shape or form. It would have been churlish to have caused a rumpus or even a vote over those matters. I should just like to place it on the record that we are delighted, whoever is given the credit in public for this movement forward on these big and important issues, that that movement has happened.