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Pensions Bill

It has been an interesting debate and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, for their support. I emphasised that I was not seeking to put 0.3 per cent in the Bill; the important issue was to flush out the position on costs. The Government are asking us to buy a pig in a poke. We are invited to give the powers and authorities that come with the Bill, but they have not worked out what it will cost. They are going to carry on working on it until some point in the future; there are no parameters within which we can expect outcomes to be achieved; and we are given no information about the emerging costs. Estimates were carried out in December 2006 but the Minister can give me no further information now. He said that it is a matter of commercial confidentiality and that he cannot give me final estimates, for which I have never asked. This is entirely unsatisfactory. PADA is already spending large amounts of money. By the end of this financial year it will have gone through the best part of £50 million. However, we do not know what the money is being spent on, what we are getting for it and what the total cost is heading towards. When the Identity Cards Bill came through Parliament, to give a similar example, we were at least told that over the first 10 years £5.7 billion would be spent. We did not make much progress on what lay behind that figure, which is why Parliament, in its wisdom, required the Home Office to present cost reports on a six-monthly basis. That £5.7 billion over 10 years is ever such a lot more information than we are getting on this Bill. The Home Office had cost estimates that were examined by accountants and reported on with some bits taken out to ensure commercial confidentiality. We knew ever such a lot more in that case. In this case we know absolutely nothing. The Minister hides behind a series of abstract words about what is being delivered. Mr Myners and Mr Jones also do that in meetings. There is very little point in having a meeting with them if one has already seen the evidence given to Select Committees and heard the reports from other meetings, because no further information is forthcoming. We are told about internet-enabled things, but no specifics on the cost emerge. It is not reasonable to ask Parliament to proceed with such a Bill unless we have information on the cost and the subsequent effect on charges. I hope the Minister will reflect on this before Report. It is an important part of the whole picture in deciding whether the design we are being asked to support can fly and whether it is within the scheme that we all agreed was a good one to go forward. We are not being given enough information to know whether we should still support what we signed up to. I hope the Minister will go back to his department and look again at what information can be made available, not at what information cannot be made available. To date, the Minister and PADA seem to have been involved in a process of asking, ““How many ways can we say that we will not give you the information?””. We need to move beyond that.