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Pension Schemes Bill

I am not going to commit from the Dispatch Box to writing 50 letters, but I will happily have a conversation with my hon. Friend about it, as I always do.

Turning to my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince), I was going to welcome his speech, but unfortunately he spent most of his remarks praising the hair of the hon. Member for Wyre Forest, showing both questionable judgment and—[Laughter.] Obviously I am joking; it is some of the finest hair in Parliament, as we all appreciate. When he got passed praising the hon. Member’s hair, he turned to the division between public and private sector pensions. It is an important one to dwell on. There have been big changes in public sector pensions under both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. He rightly made the case that the priority should be making private pensions better. That is what we should be focused on, and that is what we need to see.

That is what the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Alison Griffiths) did not quite touch on. She was focusing on levelling down pensions, whereas we want to be able to level up and make sure that the younger generations, who are the ones who are invested in our defined-contribution system, can be confident that it is delivering a comfortable retirement. I think we all agree on that.

That is why the Bill is increasing the returns that are available within the defined-contribution system. It is also why we have the Pensions Commission, which I think is part of the cross-party consensus that we should look at the adequacy that that leaves us with into the middle of this century and return to the question of how we secure that adequacy, particularly for low and middle earners.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harlow rightly mentioned the relevance to pensioners of the NHS, even if that is not of huge relevance to this Bill. If we are honest, the biggest betrayal of today’s pensioners, not tomorrow’s pensioners, is the state of our NHS, and that is what the Government are in the business of turning around. We debate in this House the tax rises that the Conservatives would not like to see, but it is those tax rises and the reforms that the Secretary of State is putting in place that are seeing waiting lists now consistently falling across the country.

I promised a discursion on the remarks of the right hon. Member for Tonbridge (Tom Tugendhat). I particularly liked his opening point that all MPs should care about pensions, not least because I think we all plan to draw our pensions—if we are not already doing so—for as long as we possibly can.