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Pensions Bill

The Minister will know that I have supported the Bill in principle from its outset, but he will also know that this issue is the one area where we must take radical and courageous action. The Government must do that if they are to make this a worthwhile Bill. I do not intend to reiterate the problems about which many hon. Members have spoken. It is true that we are dealing with a group of people who will not be able to afford to take independent advice, and thus will be reliant on generic advice. Generic advice will not be good enough to overcome the problem that we will encounter if nothing is done. We can all remember the mis-selling scandals of the past, and I fear that we might be sowing the seeds of mis-selling today, unless something certain is put into the Bill to deal with the problem. The other alternative, if we do nothing, is that very large numbers of people will be advised in the media and elsewhere to opt out. That would defeat the whole object of the Bill; we want people to save for their retirement and to have better financial security. If they are being advised in their newspapers that they would be mad not to opt out, who would blame them for deciding to opt out? The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, Central (Jim Cousins), who is well versed in these matters, made it clear that even those who stay in the scheme may opt for trivial commutation, which would be almost equally bad as opting out in many cases. It is incumbent on us now to put into the Bill something that will deal with the problem. There is only one way of dealing with the problem. We can play around with all sorts of formulae, but some element of disregard is the only true way to encourage people to save in that way. Only if they know that they will inevitably be better off staying in the scheme rather than opting out, and if that is reinforced by the newspapers they read and by television and radio programmes, will they not opt out. We can argue about how the disregard should operate—whether it is an absolute disregard, whether it is a mechanism, whether it is phased, what the timing is and so on—but something must be put into the Bill that makes it clear that people will be better off staying in the scheme rather than opting out. Unless we include such a provision, the Bill will be worthless.