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Occupational Pension Schemes (Levy Ceiling) Order 2011

My Lords, again I thank noble Lords for taking such an active part in the debate and, as ever, looking at these issues in real detail. I will aim to answer as many of the questions as I can before I resort to the expedient of the letter. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, is completely right about this being our last opportunity—last unforced opportunity, if you like—to do this under the affirmative procedure, so we should—and we are—taking advantage of that opportunity. He asked about the spilt between risk-based and scheme-based. Eighty per cent of the quantum is designed to be risk-based. That varies slightly, but the figures have held pretty firm over the years so, without going through endless figures, if we look at the £600 million for 2011-12, which I referred to at the outset, the risk-based element is estimated to be £480 million and the scheme-based element is £120 million. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, and my noble friend Lord Boswell asked about the impact of raising the cap and about how many people are affected by it. As at January 2011, 92 scheme members receiving compensation were affected by the cap. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, asked about time in assessment. The real driver in that is legal action, which can take many years. As he saw, that is connected to the change in the Pension Bill. The problem we have is that resolving some of these issues can take a lot of time. On top of that, assessment is often delayed by poor scheme data and uncertainty about what the scheme rules are. It is not people being dilatory; there are genuine problems. My team has just informed me that, in opening, I made a mistake. I said that the newer cap applies to people entitled to compensation before 2011 and I should have said after 2011. I am sure noble Lords knew what I meant. I apologise to the Committee. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, asked whether the cap was overrated if it was linked to earnings. That is not the case because, to take an example, the comparator is the position of a 50 year-old at the insolvency of the employer. We want someone whose employer goes bust this year to be capped at the same relative level as someone whose employer went bust, for example, in 2005. The calculation of the levy formula is something for the board of the Pension Protection Fund. The proposals concern the distribution of the levy between schemes and not the overall quantum. Will individuals be worse off due to the switch from RPI to CPI? The current market conditions mean that the cost of providing RPI or CPI are equal, but we have to recognise that there may be a divergence in future and we shall review that over the summer in the light of emerging evidence. The noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, asked about indices. Without going into a full-blown techie analysis, the question was about whether we can make CPI a better fit with pensioner inflation. The ONS is working to include owner-occupied housing costs in its statistical programme. It is a very active programme. Rather than using mortgage costs, according to its research, the likely outcome—I may be jumping the odd hurdle to reach that conclusion, but bear with me—would be to take the cost of an average house and see how that moves up and down. I cannot see that happening much before two years, but an active process is taking place and the ONS will work very closely with European statistical organisations because it would need to be a general move. One of the most interesting things is that the CPI has been adopted as the main measure, certainly for comparative purposes in Europe. The Americans took the decision to go down this route because of the geometric approach, which basically gets elasticities closer to one, which reflects substitution, as opposed to any elasticities closer to nought, which do not show much substitution, and that is seen in the arithmetic mean used mainly in the RPI. In the CPI, interestingly, about 70 per cent is done geometrically. The other 30 per cent of goods, which are hard to substitute—oil, for instance—are left at that low-elasticity arithmetic mean. We will have more of that next week. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, asked whether the implications of this switch to CPI mean that some FAS members would find that the total value of their protection from the UK Government is reduced to a level that the European Court of Justice indicated would be below the minimum lawful percentage for protection. Perhaps I slightly overinterpret the question, but we have looked at that closely and we believe that the Government continue to meet their obligations under Article 8 of the European insolvency directive.