Pensions Bill

moved Amendment No. 33: 33: After Clause 35, insert the following new Clause— ““Report to Parliament about costs of Personal Accounts Scheme (1) Before the end of the six months beginning with the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must prepare and lay before Parliament a report setting out his estimate of the public expenditure likely to be incurred on the Personal Accounts Scheme during the ten years beginning with the laying of the report. (2) Before the end of every six months beginning with the laying of a report under this section, the Secretary of State must prepare and lay before Parliament a further report setting out his estimate of the public expenditure likely to be incurred on the Personal Accounts Scheme during the ten years beginning with the end of those six months. (3) References in this section, in relation to any period of ten years, to the public expenditure likely to be incurred on the Personal Accounts Scheme are references to the expenditure likely to be incurred over that period by the Secretary of State, the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority and any successor body to the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority.”” The noble Baroness said: My Lords, the amendment would insert a new clause to require the Secretary of State to publish a report on the costs of the personal accounts scheme every six months. The report would be in the form of a rolling 10-year forecast of public expenditure likely to be incurred. As I explained in Committee, it is modelled on the cost report produced in respect of the identity cards scheme. I explained also in Committee that the amendment was suggested to us by the Association of British Insurers, although we are happy to support it. The cost report on identity cards was a direct result of our similar amendment which won the support of your Lordships’ House when we considered the Identity Cards Bill. We believe that concerns about large-scale projects in the public sector are so great that mechanisms have to be found to keep these projects subject to public scrutiny during their gestation and implementation. Too many large-scale projects, in particular those involving IT, have gone wrong, have cost too much and have delivered too little, too late. My noble friend Lord Lucas led a debate on this in your Lordships’ House a couple of weeks ago, when he laid out the plain fact that the list of failures is very long indeed. We cannot rely on the Government volunteering information. That has rarely happened in the past. I remember only too well the struggle to obtain the barest outline of the costs of the Dome until well after the damage had been done. Relying on the National Audit Office to reveal the facts after the event is not good enough. We all want this personal accounts scheme to work and we believe that transparency, which we debated on a previous amendment, is an essential component of keeping progress on the project in public view. We also cannot rely on the Freedom of Information Act to reveal the information. The Government are adept at deploying the various exemptions from disclosure; even when the Information Commissioner finds against them, they have been known to defy him. We cannot rely on the Office of Government Commerce and the gateway reviews, because these are deliberately kept out of the public domain. Indeed, the latest twist involves reports that the Treasury have ordered that copies of the gateway reviews be destroyed after they are undertaken. The Treasury has never believed in transparency. In Committee, the Minister said that the funding of the personal accounts scheme is a matter not for this Bill but for the next, but I do not think that that is quite right. The delivery authority’s function as set out in Clause 33(1) is to prepare for implementation of personal accounts as well as to advise on the Secretary of State’s proposals. The Explanatory Notes to the Bill make it clear at paragraph 91 that, "““much preliminary work must be done in advance of Royal Assent of the planned second Bill””," and paragraph 93 states that the delivery authority would, "““Formulate a commercial strategy for the personal accounts scheme by preparing specific products which comprise a financial, technical and commercial strategy prior to issuing an Invitation to Negotiate””." The Minister mentioned that in the context of a previous amendment. I hope that he will not tell me that this does not involve detailed costing. If we cannot get information from the delivery authority under this Bill, we must wait for the next Bill. We might well be talking about at least another year before a new Bill becomes law and we do not know whether there will be transparency provisions in that Bill. Certainly there will be an information void as a minimum between now and Royal Assent of the next Bill. In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, asked very reasonably whether the period of six months was too short. To date, there have been two identity cards cost reports, which are six monthly. The initial one contained no surprises, but the second one, which was available in May, showed that the costs had gone up by nearly £1 billion in six months—and no one thinks that it will stop there. Therefore, I am rather inclined to think that six months can be a long time if a project is going out of control in any way and that any longer period would not serve the needs of transparency and accountability. I beg to move.