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Pensions Bill

I support both Amendments Nos. 60 and 78 and the arguments put forward by my noble friend Lady Thomas and the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. In confirming the noble Baroness’s fears over some of the levelling down, the important PricewaterhouseCoopers report, reported in the financial pages of today’s Guardian, is significantly worrying to me. Although colleagues across the Committee are accustomed to the trend of closing defined benefit schemes to new employees, the report clearly demonstrates that 16 per cent of participants have closed their DB schemes to future accrual by existing members and that another 11 per cent expect to do so. That is a worrying degree of change in a short time and I hope that the Government are actively considering it. It supports the argument and adds detail to the important points made by the noble Baroness. I hope that the Government have something to say on that trend, which, if sustained, will be extremely worrying. However, having listened to what the Minister said, I am particularly concerned about the impact of Amendments Nos. 60 and 78 on small—I mean small—enterprises: the kind of businesses that are the mainstay of the economy of my home region of south-east Scotland, in the Borders. If the Government are doing this work—I am glad that they are—can we have some assurance that specific parts of it will address micro-businesses and not just small enterprises in the normal sense of the phrase? The Minister was reassuring in that he said that this work is being done. My worry is that most of his approach addressed much bigger enterprises and companies of a scale that are more realistically able to limit administration costs. I am thinking of family businesses with five or six employees, maybe 12 at most. I hope that, in any work that the department does in investigating these important matters, it has a special section that satisfies itself that the condition applying in those circumstances will be adequately addressed, as well as the conditions for the bigger, more professional schemes with teams of accountants who can more easily deal with these things administratively.