---

Pensions Bill

moved Amendment No. 112ZE: 112ZE: Clause 69, page 34, line 5, leave out ““the Secretary of State or”” The noble Baroness said: I shall speak also to the other amendments in this group. They are probing amendments, based partly on a briefing from the Law Society of Scotland, and they focus on the role of PADA. Under Clause 69(1)(b), PADA is to advise and assist both the Secretary of State and the Pensions Regulator in connection with compliance. My Amendment No. 112ZE deletes the Secretary of State. It is quite unclear to me why the Pensions Regulator should need PADA to advise it on compliance. The regulator is going to have to devise its own approach to compliance, and I am not at all clear why PADA will know anything more about that than the regulator. However, I am even more unclear about why the Secretary of State should be involved—he is not going to run the compliance regime. This is just a recipe for too many cooks spoiling the broth. Under Clause 69(1)(a), PADA has the functions of assisting and advising the Secretary of State in connection with setting up the personal accounts pensions scheme, which is what we would expect. However, Clause 69(3) says that the advice given to the Secretary of State can include assistance and so on to the trustees of the scheme. Amendment No. 112ZF deletes that for two reasons. First, it explores why PADA has to advise the Secretary of State in order to advise the trustees. In other words, why can it not do so directly? Secondly, it explores whether this blurs the independence of the trustee corporation whose board alone will be responsible for decisions made. The Secretary of State will have no role in those decisions—or at least he should not—and to channel advice through him is to create the murkiest of water. Amendment No. 112ZG makes it clear that PADA’s functions in relation to financial products are strictly limited to advice to the Secretary of State in connection with establishing the personal accounts scheme. We do not want to see PADA morphing into some kind of all-purpose advisory body getting involved in different kinds of savings and pensions products; it should be focused solely on personal accounts—that is what its title says it is, a personal accounts delivery authority—and nothing else. Amendment No. 112ZH replaces ““corporation’s”” with ““Authority’s”” in Clause 69(7). As far as I can see, the Bill refers to PADA as ““the Authority”” throughout, while ““the corporation”” is used in Chapter 4 to refer to the trustee corporation. I think that subsection (7) is supposed to be about PADA rather than the trustee corporation, and that is what my amendment seeks to achieve. I beg to move.