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Occupational Pensions

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Let me dash quickly through what I think we should be doing. What is required is a sum of, say, £150 million a year that needs to be put in place now and remain there for the foreseeable future. How could we do that? First, we could take a scoop out of the unallocated budgets for the Department for Work and Pensions for the next six years; it would not even be noticed. That would provide ample time to establish a trust fund, with whatever forms of partnerships in it, to make secure the ongoing provision of that £150 million. Secondly, we could pursue the initial proposal of my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) and use a sliver of the money that we propose to take out of orphan assets from banks, building societies and insurance funds. That would easily cover such provision. We could consider our direct Government responsibilities and acknowledge that if we took a fraction of the £10 billion-a-year taxpayer subsidy that we currently allocate to higher rate tax relief, £150 million out of £10 billion would barely scratch the surface. It would not be much more of a pinch out of the £10 billion of taxpayer support that goes into the payment of contracting-out rebates. It is not as though we are short of existing taxpayer subsidies for doing the wrong things. If we can afford to tax-subsidise the pensions of the rich and those who contracted out rather than remained within, we should be able to find the £150 million to do the decent thing for pensioners whose only crime was to believe us when we told them that their pensions were secure. We are considering a worse problem than that caused by Maxwell, which affected 32,000 pensioners. The current problem affects 120,000 to 125,000 pensioners. Then, the Government acted quickly and properly. Today our response is partial, parsimonious and reluctant. My plea is to give Parliament the opportunity to decide for itself, on an affirmative resolution, whether we believe that we should exercise that responsibility to pensioners who acted on our assurances and were misled. If we fail to make that stand, not only will we be made to look foolish and shallow by the courts, but any future generation of pension schemes that we devise will simply fall off the table of credibility. We owe it to ourselves as much as to pensioners to redress the error.