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Pensions Bill

I shall make a brief response. The noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, hopes that levelling down will not occur. We will return to that as we go through our Committee stage. Certainly, some of the evidence that is starting to come from organisations such as the ABI shows that employers are increasingly concerned about how compliance with the personal accounts scheme—we will come to this again, probably later this evening—and how definitions work in the current scheme are pushing them towards levelling down, because it is too much like hard work to comply. We will return to that theme. We cannot regard it as an idle threat. It is a real problem, which we must bear in mind. The Minister prayed in aid his friend flexibility when he introduced his amendments. I hope that flexibility will not accompany him to the Dispatch Box for every amendment that he moves today, but we shall see. I have one comment on the amendments on charges that the Liberal Democrat Benches and the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, have spoken to. When the Pensions Commission report came out, there was a great focus on charges. A criticism of the report was that charges are just one side of the equation and that the report did not look at returns. If we simply concentrate on whether charges are higher or lower than the eventual level in the personal accounts scheme—we do not know what that is, or whether we will achieve the aspiration of 0.3 per cent—and do not look at returns, we will mislead ourselves. Looking only at the charging levels is a narrow approach to comparability. I accept that charging can have a big impact on net returns if gross returns are equal between investment opportunities, but they are not. I therefore hope that that will be taken into account when those who have tabled these amendments consider what to do with them.