Miss Anne Begg (Aberdeen, South)

5.25 pm

Since I came to the House, debate in this Chamber on pensions legislation has predominantly concerned people who are pensioners today. The Government's track record in respect of them is very good, not least with the minimum income guarantee and the pension credit. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ayr (Sandra Osborne) said, the people in all our constituencies who have benefited from the pension credit are delighted with it. They do not want it to be put under threat.

I listened with interest to the proposals made by Conservative Members. They seem to have forgotten that the old age pension is not a universal benefit. About 1.5 million pensioners, mainly women, either have no state pension or only a partial one. They are the ones most threatened by any changes to the pension credit proposed by Conservative Members, and it is they who would have to pay for any spending promises made by the Opposition.

The debate, however, has rightly moved on to the pensioners of tomorrow. We need to address the question of what will happen to them. Pensions should

be an issue not for the elderly, but for the young. I agree with the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Paul Holmes) that we must restore the confidence of young people in the value of providing for their old age. The young people who do not do so will inevitably place an extra burden on those who are working when they get older. We must ensure that the pension system is secure, and that people can be guaranteed that the pension that they invest in throughout their working lives is safe.

I serve on the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, which published a report last year on the future of UK pensions. We concluded that there was not a crisis in the pension industry as a whole, but that there certainly was a crisis of confidence. If left to fester, that could be equally damaging. I welcome the Bill because it goes some way towards providing the security needed to make pensions safe in the future. The PPF is getting a lot of attention today, and I believe that it will make things better in the future. I shall return to that matter later in my remarks but, before I do, I want to highlight some of the Bill's other provisions.

I am glad that the Government have adopted some of the Select Committee's recommendations. Some of their solutions are not quite as we proposed, but at least they have paid attention to the matters that needed considering. The Bill has had to reflect the fact that the country's work force is changing. People need to plan for retirement, as the Bill makes clear, but the Government must be able to reconcile people's different desires for their old age.

In the past few months, I was contacted by one of my former teaching colleagues. He is afraid that the Government's proposals mean that he will not be able to retire, and so take advantage of his Scottish teacher's pension, at the age of 60—a possibility that he regarded with some horror. I do not know whether he wants to get out of the classroom because of what the children do to him, or because he feels that he has taught for long enough and deserves to retire at that age. By contrast, when I told the stewardess on the British Airways flight to London earlier this week that I was hoping to speak in this debate, she asked whether the Bill meant that she did not have to retire at 55. How are the Government to reconcile the wishes of someone who desperately wants to retire by 60 with those of someone who does not want to retire at 55, and ensure that the opportunities that their employers present to them, and the occupational pension schemes in which both employees have invested, are flexible enough to allow them to do whatever they choose? That is quite a difficult balancing act for the Government, and I hope that the Bill will address it.

There are different working patterns nowadays, and I was pleased to hear the Secretary of State say in his opening speech that the Government would table an amendment to rationalise accrued rights. That is a problem for people who have moved from job to job, sometimes through short-term contracts, and who have often been forced to invest in occupational schemes that they will not be in for very long. It is important to make such arrangements simple and understandable for people.

The Bill will change the arrangements under the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 1981. It is important to enable people to transfer their pensions, especially in the private sector,

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and I know that the trade unions welcome that idea. Another of the Select Committee's recommendations was that the regulator should be more proactive, and that is crucial. The minimum funding requirement is to undergo radical change, and that can only be for the good.

It is the pension protection fund that has captured most people's imagination, and that is what most Members have spoken about today. Like many other people, I would have liked such a fund to be introduced sooner. However, it is wrong of the Opposition to say that they will vote against the Bill just because the fund did not appear sooner, and did not protect people in the past.

I cannot understand that rationale. It seems peculiarly perverse to cry out for help for those who have already suffered because their pension schemes have gone into liquidation, but at the same time to vote against the measure that will protect people against such threats in the future. The logic escapes me—but logic is often absent from the Opposition's arguments. I listened hard to their speeches because I hoped to hear some admission that they created much of the mess that we see now in private pension provision. Indeed, Dr. Ros Altmann attributes the genesis of many of the problems that we are having to address in the Bill to the Pensions Act 1995, so I would like to hear a bit more honesty from the Opposition, and an admission that those problems originated with them.

I accept the Secretary of State's arguments that the pension protection fund cannot be made retrospective, as it is an insurance scheme. I accept that it is difficult to make legislation retrospective. However, that does not mean that there is not something that we should be doing. When the hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) was asked to pin down what the Opposition would do, he did not come up with anything; he just said, "We must do something." He has two brains and that is all he can think of; I only have one brain, so my plea to the Government is simply to do something, whether they adopt the suggestion made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), or what has been suggested by Ros Altmann, or a combination of the two, whereby, rather than the Government having to pay the £100 million a year, the money would come out of the unclaimed funds that my right hon. Friend has identified—or even something else altogether. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Ayr, I do not really care which option the Government choose, but it is important that workers who have lost out as a result of a company going into liquidation should be helped in some way.

I have several constituents in this position. In an intervention on the Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen, Central (Mr. Doran) mentioned Richards, which is in his constituency. A number of the people affected by the collapse of the Richards pension fund are my constituents, and nothing concentrates the mind more than individual constituents coming to tell one about injustice and unfairness. That puts everything in perspective: the situation is unfair, and those people have done everything that the Government wanted them to do, so it behoves the Government to do something about it.

The Bill does the right thing; and the Government are doing the right thing for those who may be affected in the future. My appeal today is for the Government to do the right thing for those who in recent years have suffered from what has happened in the past. It is a good Bill, and we should all support it. I hope that it will be amended in Committee to help those who have suffered in the past as well as protect people in the future.