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Pensions Bill

This is a very important amendment, but first I should remind the Committee of the interests that I declared on Second Reading. I pick up from where the noble Lord, Lord Turner, ended. It is important to lay down this type of amendment now so that the authority, in doing the preparatory work which we expect it to do over the next few years, is very clear about what the objectives will be by which its success or failure is judged. My fear is that, if we are not careful, we could have a pension authority that, a number of years hence, declares the great success of its scheme in terms of the number of people who have been involved in personal pension accounts but takes no notice and scores nowhere in its target the fact that a very large proportion of those—and in the worst case, all of those—have come about simply by switching people from better schemes into a less good one because of subsidies, the mechanism of advice or the cost structures that have been put around it. Therefore, right from the beginning, we have to be very clear about the goalposts by which we wantto measure the scheme’s success and which the preparatory work should be setting out to achieve. For that reason, it is important that this is built into the primary legislation.