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Pensions Bill

As I drafted this amendment, I think that it is only fair for me to respond and explain, particularly for the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, the thinking behind it. I thank noble Lords who have spoken for their general support. We should clarify that we are not saying that everybody has to have had advice in this category; they just have to have been offered it and to have the chance to have it. If they want only a quarter of an hour or half an hour, that is fine. We stress the ““at least”” element. The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, can say that advice is a problem, but are we seriously saying that it would be satisfactory for the millions of people in this at-risk group just to be told to ring a number and press one, two or three? Are we telling them to go on to the world wide web, which seems to be the thrust of the Government’s thinking, when many of them may not want to go on to the world wide web? They may not be comfortable with it; poorer people may not even be linked to it. We think that this is a sensible and balanced way of making sure that advice is available to those members of a high-risk group—anyone who has done any work on this admits that it is a high-risk group—if they want it. It is not prescriptive; it just says that an amount of generic advice—I stress that—would be available. The answer to the fair points made by the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, about whether people will be sued and what sort of advice there will be is that, no, they will not be sued because the advice is of a generic nature. The typical thing that we will want to say—this is why I believe that the Government are being much too complacent about the risks—is, ““Are you paying 17 per cent interest on your credit card bill each month, which you have not paid off? Are you having a choice between paying that, paying your mortgage and contributing to a pension?””. Those sorts of questions are the ones that will focus people’s minds. The work done by the DWP and the most recent projections of entitlement to income-related benefits still show a high number of people on pension credit, even under the present system: 40 per cent of people will still be on that means-tested pension credit in 2020, with 30 per cent in 2050. These projections show people who are at risk even if they have no debts at all—even if they are not paying high rates of interest on debt. Many people in the poorer target groups are badly stuck in debt. There are about 2 million people irreversibly stuck in debt in this country and that figure is going up rapidly. We do not propose to press this amendment to a vote today, but I look forward—particularly after we have heard the Minister’s reply—to constructive discussions and to seeing whether we can bring forward an amendment that works at Report. We believe that there should be a national network. We would probably prefer to have it based on the citizens advice bureaux, but we are not prescribing that. We are saying that the network needs to be a trusted brand and that it needs to be financed by the Government. There is such an enormous expansion of the many millions of people who are the least sophisticated financially in our society that it is unthinkable that we should pass this Bill while leaving this issue on a wing and a prayer, hoping that Thoresen’s work, or other things, may emerge later. There will be web-based or telephone services with no guarantee of face-to-face advice for the people who need it the most. I very much welcome the support from many parts of the Committee and hope that we can get to a more workable and generally agreeable amendment at Report.