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Pensions Bill

My Lords, the Minister has sketched out the background to the problem and I am extremely grateful to him for that. I am also glad that the cut-off date is to be extended. The amendments that we moved originally would have set up a fund taking any unclaimed assets identified by the public assets register, with the exception of those in banks and building societies, which have already been allocated by the Government to another public good—that of assisting children and charities—as their unprecedented Statement on future legislation told us. I rather wonder whether the Minister has been reading the same Young report as I got from the Printed Paper Office yesterday. On page 5, it clearly states: "““the Review team believe it should still conduct some further investigation of the complex legal and operational issues raised by unclaimed assets, involving Government and industry as required””." The story of unclaimed assets is by no means dead. It may become dead at the end of the day, but as of this moment it is not. When the lifeboat fund is being set up, the Government will kick-start it with a loan in exactly the same way that the previous Conservative Government treated the collapsed pension schemes of the late Robert Maxwell’s commercial venture. When the Bill returned to the Commons last week, the Government said—I paraphrase—““No way””, and the great clunking fist came down, manifesting itself in the Commons reason of privilege to all but one of the group of amendments, which we will discuss shortly. It is with great regret that I tell your Lordships that, despite what the Minister rather surprisingly said in his preamble, we must accept the reason produced by another place. Shortly before your Lordships’ activities in Committee, the Government rather sold the pass by setting up the Young committee to look at whether the assets of the failed schemes could be better used once they came under the remit of the FAS. Indeed, we have just had a little exchange about the results of that. In its interim report at the end of last week, it decided that they could but that the final report would flesh out exactly how much might be available and by what means. Ministers immediately announced that they would produce matching funds. This is yet another ratcheting up of government money for the FAS—something of which I of course approve. However, I note with a certain amount of irony that one of the Government’s objections to the lifeboat scheme was that it was uncosted. So, too, is the matching money that the Government have promised. What is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. The expression ““the pot calling the kettle black”” rather springs to mind. We have not even been given a clear idea of how the Government intend to calculate the savings to which the Young review might lead. Do they perhaps intend to backdate any savings to the start of the FAS? The history of the FAS is shabby, to say the least. It was originally set up to quell a Back-Bench rebellion in another place, and was given the least amount of money—£400 million—that the Government felt they could get away with. To spread this evenly, they decided that they could not afford to pay the 90 per cent of expected pensions, which was the amount that would be paid to members of pension schemes that came under the PPF; so they invented what they called the core pension, with a de minimis limit. There is no lump-sum initial payment, no indexation and no widow’s rights. No one gets anything before the age of 65 and, even then, only after a protracted checking process that can leave people whose funds are still in wind-up with nothing at all. The number of people so far granted any sort of pension under this scheme is just under 1,500. The Minister may have an update on that figure. The Government realised that £400 million was nothing like enough, especially as they had committed themselves to paying 80 per cent of the core pension. Subsequently, £8 billion in total was eventually prised out of the Treasury’s greedy maw, although this sum is to last the entire lifetime of the FAS, which could be 50 or 60 years. Will even that be enough? They now believe that the Young review will push the amount closer to 90 per cent. When talking about this, as the Minister did just now, they conveniently leave out the word ““core””, knowing full well that 90 per cent of the core pension is not even 65 per cent of the expected pension. Nevertheless, what is currently on offer is a minute extension to the amount that these pensioners will get, but not today or even this year. What is on offer is jam yesterday, jam perhaps tomorrow, but never jam today, and, thanks to that great clunking fist, regretfully your Lordships can do nothing about it. I promise this, however; the Government may have won a battle, but the war will go on until the 125,000 pensioners get what they deserve.