Finance Bill

The hon. Gentleman is quite right. That may say something about the quality of the contribution by their Front-Bench spokesperson, or they may all be off somewhere trying to put policy together—I know not which. I shall move on to the main part of my speech, which refers to the reasoned amendment moved by the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) on behalf of her right hon. and hon. Friends. I wish to address two aspects of the amendment; the first relates to the so-called pensions crisis, and the second to tackling climate change. On the first point, we need to put the situation in three contexts: the experience of current pensioners; the experience of prospective pensioners; and, given the recent history of this country, the experience of those two groups combined. That covers, for example, someone who was a prospective pensioner in 1997, has since reached retirement age and is now drawing their pension. It is to those three groups—current, prospective, and current and prospective together looking at the history—to which I now turn. First, on current pensioners and the so-called pensions crisis, the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet used the hackneyed phrase about our having the weakest pension system in Europe. That shows a certain ignorance about other European countries with pension schemes. I do not claim to be an expert, but if she genuinely thinks that the pension system in the United Kingdom, both public and private, is, for example, anywhere near the systems in Albania, Bulgaria, Romania or some other European countries, I suspect that she is wrong.