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Pensions Bill

My Lords, I very much regret that I was not able to be present for the earlier debate, owing to a long-standing lunchtime engagement that I had in Norfolk. I would certainly have strongly supported my noble friend Lord Fowler in his proposal. This proposal is obviously second best, but I wish to support it on the obvious ground of longevity, which the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, and the noble Baroness have just mentioned. Clearly, this is changing the whole scene for pension funds in so many ways. There is also another point—if this was raised in the earlier debate, I apologise for repeating it. The Bill is supposed to be about some further encouragement for everyone in pension provision. People have had so much discouragement already with company pension schemes, final salary schemes diminishing and so on. I can think of very few things more likely to discourage them than in the next two years to have a whole crop of media stories about people who had expected to have a pension beyond the age of 75, based on the kind of equity levels that we have had until recent years, who discover that there will be a massive reduction in the pension that they can get from the annuity after the age of 75. That is if the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, is right, and I suspect he is, that there will not be a big improvement in the equity situation in the next two or three years. That applies in particular to people over the age of 72 and approaching 75 now. One can just imagine the sob stories that there will be every weekend in the papers about that sort of thing. I ask the Government to look at it again, because it will be yet another discouragement among the many that there have been for people voluntarily to make greater contributions to their pensions themselves.