Financial Assistance Scheme (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2006

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale. There was in his speech some welcome for the regulations, though one had to work hard to detect it. None the less he did describe them as beneficial and we should all be grateful for that. I understand the concern that the noble Lord expressed about the progress the FAS has made and the speed at which it is making payments. The noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, has also made the point to me on a number of occasions. For the record, the FAS made its first payments before Christmas 2005. Since then it has paid out over £2 million to more than 600 individuals. I understand that of those 519 are initial payments. It is also dealing with 900 applications from pension schemes. I know there has been disappointment at the scale of progress. We are working closely with schemes to obtain the necessary data to enable us to pay affected members as soon as we can. Based on operational data, we think that perhaps 1,900 people have reached age 65 and belong to a scheme where the trustees have applied for payments. Noble Lords will know that we are able to make payments only when trustees have provided acceptable data. That is taking longer than we had hoped. As of today, 637 have already been paid; 56 will be paid as soon as they have confirmed their personal details; and a further 149 have been assessed and will be paid when they reach the age of 65. Noble Lords will know that we also undertook an administration review, which reported earlier this year. We engaged the services of Mercers Human Resource Consulting, a leading provider of services to the pension industry, to advise on our processes and some of the issues around data that we have encountered during our first year of operation. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, at the moment the FAS unit is operated by staff from the DWP. In the long term, we think the operations are best placed in the context of the Pension Service, an executive agency of my department.