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Pensions Bill

I do not know whether the noble Lord will press the amendment to a vote, but I would not support him in the Lobbies. I do, however, support his argument. What is the state’s public interest in this? It is twofold, as has already been suggested by noble Lords: first, to ensure that pension savings are privileged in order to provide an adequate retirement income; secondly, that there be no recourse to public funds. Both those objectives are met in the subsection of Amendment No. 128 referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, by an annuitisation that I calculate to be between £120,000 and £150,000 a year. After that, if an individual chooses not to annuitise but to accept the implications of adjustment of the fiscal privileges that went to build up that fund, why does the state have any public policy interest in what happens to the residual money? It is not good enough to say that that money was protected for pension savings and must therefore be used for pension provision. A mantra is a statement of faith, not an argument based on evidence. As the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, said, 10 or 20 years ago this may have been a relatively rich person’s issue. It is no longer so, as we see the movement from DB to DC schemes. The noble Lord’s figures are exactly right; I did the calculations as he spoke. A woman on average earnings—£21,000—over 40 years, even in a personal account without a threshold, would have a pot of £250,000. That is with contributions only going in at 8 per cent of the total. If, more realistically, one has a DC scheme with higher rates, she might well have a pot of around £450,000. Only once the two considerations of no recourse to public funds and any necessary adjustment to remove fiscal privilege are accounted for has the state any public policy interest in what then happens. Not only is there therefore a residual pot of money, not only would the taxpayers’ interest be safeguarded, but the Treasury could actually get a profit on the result. If that woman on average earnings with a pot of £450,000 had, after an annuity, some residual sum of £300,000—or £200,000 or thereabouts after tax privilege—it would perhaps go into a building society on which interest was paid. More likely, it would fall into her estate, on which inheritance tax after the basic rate would be 40 per cent. The state would recover for taxpayers what currently goes towards the profitability of private insurance companies. There is an additional argument that the taxpayer would not only not lose money, but returns would fall back to the country as a whole—and, therefore, to the improvement of benefits where appropriate. I hope that my noble friend will not repeat the mantra that all Ministers, including me, have had to use on this subject at the Dispatch Box: ““Pension savings are fiscally protected to provide income for retirement””. Provided that that need is met, and the fiscal protection has been adjusted, the state has no further legitimate public interest in what happens to the rest of the money. People should be free to make the dispositions they choose.