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Pensions Bill

My amendment to line 28, leaving out subsection (6), has been grouped with this amendment for perfectly good reasons. That amendment was originally intended to be a probing amendment to confirm that the Government intended automatic re-enrolment to occur only every three years and to get this period onto the Bill in due course. I am, therefore, very glad that the Government has more or less done this job for me in their Amendment No. 21. Their new clause, ““Timing of automatic re-enrolment””, clarifies this by doing just that. I also note that this group of amendments, as the Minister said, clarifies the re-enrolment process in Clause 5—but why three years in the first place? It would obviously be too expensive and might even encourage workers to opt out if it was to take place in a period of less than three years, but why three years and not, say, five years. There must be a perfectly good reason, but what is it? There are yet other questions around the information that must be provided. Government Amendment No. 18 refers here to automatic re-enrolment, which I hope the Minister will answer. I am beginning to understand what information will need to be provided to jobholders on their original auto-enrolment, whether into a qualifying scheme or into personal accounts. However, what sort of information are the Government thinking of? If the information is too much, it must have the danger of encouraging opt-out, which is against everybody’s interests. If on the other hand it is not very much, what value will it have? After all, we are talking not entirely but mostly about people who have already been in the scheme for at least one period of three years, then opted out and are considering rejoining. I hope that most of them will have been perfectly happy with the way in which it went for them when they were auto-enrolled. The last thing we want is for them to be put off in any way. How much information will the Government require to be sent out? Furthermore, I see from Amendment No. 18 that it is the employer who is responsible for making sure that the information reaches his employee. The latter, then, is a postbox. It is clear that the information originates with the trustee, manager or provider responsible for the scheme in question when it is a qualifying scheme. However, when it is a personal accounts scheme, will the trustees send the information to the employer for onward transmission to the employee? If not, who will?