Mr. David Ruffley (Bury St. Edmunds)

3.4 pm

In December 2002, the Government set out, in response to a question, the list of Government consultations that had taken place since August 2001. Yet, unbelievably, Ministers were unable to provide details of their consultations between May 1997 and August 2001. They gave the following reason for not providing the information:

before 2001—

Pensions are a difficult and thorny subject, but such an answer is straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Ministers have displayed a stupendous lack of grip on the matter since 1997. Meanwhile, British pensions are in crisis, which is intensifying.

Adair Turner, chairman of the Government's Pensions Commission, said that in the past five years

More than 55,000 occupational pension schemes were wound up between 1997 and 2003. Since 2001, nearly 4,500 schemes have begun the process of winding up, but have not yet completed it. The parlous state of occupational pension schemes contributes to the general collapse of public confidence in long-term saving.

In our naivety, we might have supposed that a new measure called "Pensions Bill 2004" would, after all this time, include some radical and effective provisions. It is any Government's duty to supply them in circumstances in which pensioners cry out for effective action. Such reform was not to be. The Bill fails on several counts. It contains no serious proposals to reform and improve the basic state pension provision, especially in a way that will rein in the pernicious effects of means-testing, about which my hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) has often spoken so eloquently.

The reform of the basic pension is a prerequisite for encouraging employees to make more private provision through personal or occupational pensions. One needs a solid platform of basic state provision from which to float pensioners off means-testing and give them the confidence to invest over and above state provision without the risk of the means test kicking in and making their extra and responsible private savings throughout their lives of nugatory value.

above the level of the old minimum income guarantee, or the guaranteed pension level, will be a loser in any shape or form.

The elegant insight into cutting into the means test that my hon. Friend the Member for Havant supplied shows an imaginative and simple solution. That elegant solution is to boost the basic state pension in ways that would provide more incentives to save, and fewer disincentives to do so. Although the hon. Member for Glasgow, Anniesland (John Robertson) mentioned the pension credit, I stress to him that there would be no losers under my hon. Friend's proposal. The hon. Gentleman should have faith in the brilliance of my hon. Friend who, unlike Labour Members, knows what he is doing. My hon. Friend has displayed imagination in coming up with his idea. Labour Members might find counterintuitive the idea that the Conservatives want to restore the earnings link, but the proposal works and the numbers stack up—in the first instance, for the limited period of the first four years.

The other problem with the Bill, apart from the lack of imagination to which I have referred, is that it makes no constructive proposals for reforming occupational pensions in a way that would prevent future losses of the kind that we saw in Allied Steel and Wire and other depressing cases.

The constructive proposals for tackling the losses of those who lost everything—

the next election, according to the commitment first announced, I think, by the Chancellor? We do not know. Most people think it highly unlikely, given that he is trying to save money in his next comprehensive spending review.

What is to be done about the individuals who have lost everything? Before moving on to that, and to the proposals of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), I want to mention the Bill's most important proposal, which is not entirely without merit: the pension protection fund. I have some sympathy with the Government over their task of setting the right level of protection. If that is set too low, future pensioners will not get the cover that they need, but if it is set too high, the premiums will be too crippling and prohibitive for companies.

At first blush, it might seem that the Government have gone for a practical compromise in the Bill, essentially saying that existing pensioners will get 100 per cent. cover and future pensioners will get 90 per cent. of their benefits. Current pensioners will have a reduced indexation of 2.5 per cent. for post-1997 benefits, with no indexation before 1997. So far, so good—one might think. However, the question that has not been answered is how reliable is the Government's estimate of the total cost of the levy. They have put that at about £300 million, but under FRS17, Watson Wyatt has calculated that the whole of British industry's current deficit could be £60 billion. In that context, £300 million does not look terribly realistic.

That does not bode well for a successful pension protection fund. Moreover, the Government do not have any estimate of the number of pension funds that are cheerily waiting for the creation of the pension protection fund so that they can make a claim. Add to that the fact that in the first year the fund will be collecting only the fixed-rate levy, and one can well envisage how the fund might be in deficit at the start of its life.

Clearly, a flat-rate levy on its own will bring moral hazard, because cross-subsidisation from the healthier to the weaker funds will provide a powerful disincentive to giving greater contributions to the weaker funds. That is why the Government have introduced a risk-based element to the levy. Again, that seems reasonable, until one starts to ask how that will be assessed. It seems that the assessment will take into account the surplus and discount of the pension fund, the company's solvency and the fund's mix of assets and liabilities. However, I thought that the Government were arguing for abolishing the minimum funding requirement provisions precisely so that funds could return to higher-performing equities with higher returns when they wished to. That is not likely to happen if there is a risk-based element, because that is likely to lead, on average, to a higher levy.

Another devilishly difficult problem for the Government, to which the Bill contains no answer, is that the risk test will require actuaries to make various judgments. Current opinion in the actuarial profession, depending on to whom one speaks, is not entirely sure whether bonds are the best means of matching pension liabilities these days. The consensus among professionals is that the risk element in the levy will be difficult to assess reliably and consistently. Perhaps the most obvious problem with the risk-based element is

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that the weakest funds will pay the most. The weaker they get, the higher the levy. That could well exacerbate problems for a weaker fund, even given the transitional arrangements that seek to obviate the need to tackle that problem.

The fund is no panacea. The model that the Government have borrowed—the US Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation—is running at a deficit of more than $11 billion. The only logical outcome for the model that the Government have come up with is for the pension protection fund to reduce benefits to below the proposed level of 90 per cent. for current or 100 per cent. for existing pensioners. It is a matter of logic that the Government will have to cut those benefits because they have capped the levy. Had they not done so, any deficit in the fund could be closed or reduced by raising the levy, but they have expressly ruled out that policy option. The Government seem to have boxed themselves in.

The fund should come with a large health warning for future occupational pension holders. Presumably, that will come with the further information to be sent out as a result of part 4 of the Bill. The fact is that this is not a guaranteed scheme, and the Government would be duping future occupational pension holders if they were to pretend that it were.

I would like to touch on the points raised by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead. I seek a point of clarification from the Minister as to what legal advice he has received—perhaps he would care to publish it—on the status of the unclaimed assets that would form the basis of the scheme proposed by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead. That would involve an endowment quite separate from the fund in the Bill, and it would be hugely useful to get a definitive ruling on that status.

Mr. Frank Field: Would it be a good idea to ask the Attorney-General?

Mr. Ruffley: The right hon. Gentleman has anticipated the gag that I was about to make. I know that legal advice is a sensitive subject for Labour Members, and I also know that they have different views on the matter. Perhaps the Minister could clarify whether there is anything in the right hon. Gentleman's proposal that is worth looking at—the Secretary of State was very unclear on that—or whether the Government can give a definitive ruling that it is not a runner, and that it is a free lunch that will, frankly, not be available. Clarification of that issue would assist all of us in our deliberations on the Bill.

The Bill as a whole does too little, too late. As a result, current and future pensioners are being let down, and the Bill needs to be voted against.