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Pensions Bill

I should like to press the Secretary of State on the point about generic financial advice. The Government have sought to use generic financial advice as a way of helping people to decide whether they will be better off and therefore whether they should exercise their right to opt out; obviously we hope that relatively few of them will. Is he saying that because everything is 25 years in the future, particularly for people who are under 21 or 24 years old, the decision is all too hard and that it does not really matter? If not, can he please tell us what he plans to do if the pilots of generic financial advice—I presume that there will be pilots—prove not to give people satisfactory levels of information and not to improve the generally terrible levels of financial literacy in this country, and if people therefore start taking the wrong decisions? Will he ignore that or does he have a plan B?