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Pensions Bill [Lords] (Programme) (No. 2)

I am grateful to the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee for drawing my attention to that document, and I am keen to see a copy. Pensions selling is, broadly speaking, regulated by the Financial Services Authority. Claims about pensions need to be accurate. NEST charges are the equivalent—on an average pension—of around 0.5%, as the hon. Lady knows. The suggestion is that a charge of 0.75% or 1% is ““comparable””. We can compare anything with anything, but the comparison is not always favourable. She raises an important point, and the pensions regulator and the FSA will seek to ensure that people are given accurate information about pensions. The right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), who speaks for the Opposition, will be well aware that the Government already have a duty to review NEST after the five-year roll-out of auto-enrolment. New clauses 9 and 10 would not repeal the other duty, so they would mean a review in two years and another one three years after that. The earlier review would be premature and unhelpful in the middle of the roll-out. One might want to tweak 1,001 things, but a review in the middle of roll-out would create uncertainty when the next tranche of firms is choosing which provider to go for. Will NEST have its limit lifted? Will the transfer ban go? Those questions would mean yet more turmoil. An element of certainty in the auto-enrolment process, which has been iterated quite a lot, would be welcome. The right hon. Gentleman will know that the Government had our own review—““Making automatic enrolment work””—last summer. It said that in the end, in 2017, the restrictions should go. I am entirely sympathetic to that proposition, but deciding that today, or reviewing the situation in the middle of the roll-out, is not the best way forward. Finally, I shall make some observations on waiting periods and the earnings trigger for auto-enrolment. Just to be clear, the Bill introduces a voluntary waiting period of 13 weeks. The previous Government's legislation proposed that people had to be auto-enrolled on the day they started. That might not coincide with an employer's pay period, and it might require very large numbers of employees to be enrolled on a single day. That was the legislation that we inherited. The Bill creates a 13-week waiting period. Somebody who values their pension rights can still opt in, but the Government listened very carefully to the concerns of smaller businesses. Their judgment was that requiring them to enrol people on day one was a considerable burden. The flexibility of a three-month period strikes a balance. We were being lobbied to specify six months and to exclude small firms altogether, but we judged that a three-month period strikes the right balance.