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Pensions Bill [HL]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord McKenzie with regard to this section of the Bill. I have received many letters from various organisations about the Bill—like most people, I expect—and one thing that they all have in common is that they are all very concerned about what they regard as the acceleration of the timetable for women. I have had correspondence from Saga, which tells me that it believes that 2.6 million women will be adversely affected. It points out that the women concerned had not expected such an accelerated timetable. The TUC has also said that it is concerned about the acceleration and its effect upon women. Age UK is taking a similar posture, and so is Which?. A number of noble Lords who contributed to our Second Reading debate concentrated on what they saw as the unfairness to women in the accelerated timetable. The amendments proposed by my noble friend are an attempt to deal with that, for which I thank him. I hope that the Government will be prepared to take on board that this is a real concern about a Bill that basically many people accept. Practically everyone who has written to me says that they accept the whole idea of auto-involvement—of people being in the pension industry, so to speak, and being pension savers for very often the first time in their lives. It therefore seems a shame that we might get some difficulty and some opposition to a Bill that I basically accept. I accept that we have to have a different age of retirement and so on because of longevity and the various other arguments that have been advanced in favour of the Bill, but on the other hand there is a lot of concern about the accelerated timetable. I hope that the Government can do something to help us in that regard.