Financial Assistance Scheme (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2006

My Lords, the noble Lord should not take that to be, or not to be. These matters will undoubtedly have to be decided in due course. We reckon that for the first three years of the FAS there will be about a £10.5 million start-up and running cost, which it is unfair to compare with the actual amounts to be paid out. It is also worth making the point that this exercise is costly because of the work in relation to the schemes, the information that has to be gained and the databases that have to be set up. Once that has been done, the cost of the FAS should then come down as it should be much more a paying-out operation, which is why it is then more suitable to be transferred into the Pension Service. The noble Lord made a number of other comments about the scheme. I think he implied, even though there is an extension to 15 years with tapering provisions, that it would not apply to all members affected by the failure of the schemes we are discussing. There is no question but that anyone who is concerned about pensions will feel the deepest sympathy for those affected by the failure of their pension schemes, but he will know—this was behind the original decisions about the FAS, and the basic philosophy remains the same—that there is a difficult balance to be drawn here between concern for the individual scheme members and the issue of how much the taxpayer can reasonably be expected to fund, bearing in mind that many taxpayers will not benefit from pension schemes even as generous as the contributions that the FAS will provide to scheme members.