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Pensions Bill

With the leave of the House, I seek to reply to this debate and to some of the points raised. Let me first deal with what should perhaps be described as the political knockabout points, before moving on to the serious stuff. Various claims were made about the Parliament Act 1911, which has a number of different provisions. It was invoked, as described by the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson), when the other place refused to accept particular pieces of legislation regularly passed by this House. That probably happened on about seven occasions—indeed, I think that I was part of the process with one of them—but that is not what we are talking about here. Rather, we are talking about the invoking of financial privilege, which happens to be dealt with in the 1911 Act, but which has been regularly invoked in this place over many years. It is therefore an entirely different matter from the point raised by the hon. Gentleman. The parliamentary procedures are different, and such invoking in the other place merely means that the Lords would have to table a differently worded amendment. It was therefore possible—I assumed that Opposition Members knew this—to table a differently worded amendment, if the Opposition really want to bring back their lifeboat proposal. Frankly, however, it was pretty well sunk by the Young report, so they were better off not doing that. The lifeboat proposal was torpedoed not by the Government, but by the Young report, which said that the basis on which it was framed—that pensions and the various insurance assets were unclaimed and lying there, and could easily be accessed—faced impediments so great that it was not a realistic option.