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Occupational Pensions

My hon. Friend is right. What is also extraordinary is how fiercely the Chancellor is resisting freedom of information applications to obtain the advice that he received at the time on his decision to scrap dividend tax credit. I mentioned that there were three reasons for building a consensus. The second is that any decisions made, or not made, now will have an effect 40 or 50 years on. Any number of Ministers and Governments will have come and gone by then. Thirdly, there is every possibility that it will fall to the Conservatives to implement many of the reforms. That serves to concentrate the mind in opposition. We want to ensure that whatever happens is workable and can deliver a sustained and meaningful benefit to future generations of people in retirement. I will say little in this debate about the state pension changes. The restoration of the earnings link and help for women pensioners, for example, were both in our last manifesto. Retirement must become more of a process, rather than an event. Yes, we should gradually extend the state pension age, but we must build in flexibility in retirement. A massively important part of the Turner-inspired reforms is the setting up of personal accounts. We support the general direction of travel on that, but we have a number of serious concerns—as the Minister knows, because we share them fairly regularly. I do not have time to go into them in this debate. They include means-testing, levelling down, some of the cliff edges in the state pension changes and the whole issue of public sector pensions, where the total liabilities are now estimated at over £1 trillion. It is interesting that research to be published by the pensions industry tomorrow includes some quite serious figures on the effect that levelling down could have under the personal accounts regime. If personal accounts are to fill the yawning gap in savings for retirement in this country, they must command the confidence of British workers. That in itself is a good enough reason for trying to achieve consensus. If people pick up on the fact that the official Opposition and Government-in-waiting have concerns and might change everything in due course, it would be yet another excuse for putting off decisions about their own pensions. There is another factor that has caused untold damage to people’s confidence in pensions: the regular publicity surrounding those who through no fault of their own have lost their pensions. We have heard a great deal about that tonight. On any view—I choose my words carefully—the Government’s handling of the situation has been both shabby and inept. It has been an insult to the 125,000 people involved. However, the Government have also undermined the pivotal position of the ombudsman in our constitutional system.