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Pensions Bill

Perhaps I can help my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale. I would love to have run with an amendment that covered as of right all earnings from pound one, irrespective of whether in each individual employment it was capped above or below the LEL. In other words, somebody who has five jobs of, say £2,000 or £3,000 each, which together bring in an income of £15,000 would nonetheless have a pension contribution by an array of employers matched by the employee. I would have loved to have done that. I do not think it is viable as it does not adequately yet reflect the role of the basic state pension. We do not allow people to sum their hours together if they have multiple jobs below the LEL. We do for tax credits—this is what is batty about the system—but not for the basic state pension. People may have half a dozen micro jobs—perhaps gardening, cleaning and so on—and the implications of trying to track pension contributions through on £1,000 a year or £40 a week, just seems to me too complex, much though I would like to see it happen. That is why in my amendment I went for a less generous amendment than that the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, which is that you have to have earnings of £5,000, but that if they exceed that you could elect and then require maximum contributions from the employer for the first £5K because you would already be in the system. So I went for the administrative simplicity and what I thought was the feasibility of that amendment rather than the more generous amendment moved by the noble Lord. That is why I suspect that my noble friend’s reply is rather different this time.