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Pensions Bill

I was disappointed in the Minister’s responses. He gave me quite a lot of information on how the department’s working party, or inter-departmental group, looked at costs and what information it used. But he did not really answer the point about why there were no business representatives on that group. It is one thing to carry out surveys of businesses, but it is another thing to invite business into your deliberations as a part of it. The Minister should not be surprised that the result is disputed by business. He can tell me all he likes that it will cost £70 in administration costs on an ongoing basis. Those figures simply are not recognised by business. That is a big problem because the gap in ongoing costs, as I said earlier, is a three-fold difference. Businesses think that it costs three times as much as the Government suggest. Potentially, this is a very big problem. Let us put the quantum to one side. The Minister talked about phasing and staging. The burden of what he was saying is that he is not going to tell us how phasing or staging will work in practice because the Government have not made up their mind. The Minister did not even say that the Government would use staging for smaller enterprises. He just said that, in the past, it has been done by size of company, but he did not say that smaller businesses would be the beneficiaries of this scheme. The totality of what he has said did not satisfy me and I am sure that it does not satisfy the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, to whom I am grateful for his support. Between now and Report, we will want to go away and look again at whether this Bill correctly reflects the desire to ensure that the small and medium-sized business community is adequately covered and protected by what are potentially very disruptive changes that could be introduced when personal accounts are first brought forward. We do not want them to be disruptive and I am sure that the Government do not want that either, but I do not think that they can yet give us any confidence that they see the problem and know that it has to be dealt with. Clause 26 agreed to. Clause 27 [Transitional period for defined benefits and hybrid schemes]: [Amendment No. 82 not moved.] Clause 27 agreed to.