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Occupational Pensions

I am coming to the end of my time, if the hon. Gentleman does not mind. We need to look at issues such as increasing take up of pensioners’ entitlement. I applaud the work of welfare rights teams and other organisations in my constituency to increase benefits take-up. We need to look at investment decisions and the effects that they have. We desperately need a consensus on the future of pensions. I thought and hoped that that was the direction in which we were going, so I have not found today a helpful diversion. We need to look at the future of our pensions system, which was created in conditions very different from today’s. Demographic changes have taken place since them. In the past we had different family and working patterns. We were not dealing with the problems of carers, for example, which I talked about in the Second Reading debate on the Pensions Bill. I hope that we can return to a serious debate on those issues, which are complex and difficult, and that we will get away from the back-biting and polemics and move seriously towards the consensus on our future pensions system that we so desperately need.