I certainly will, when I come to it.
Lord Hutton’s first set of recommendations consisted of safeguards to ensure that the long-term cost of pensions was sustainable through a link between state pension age and normal pension age, and included a cost-cap mechanism to protect the taxpayer in the event that other unforeseen costs arose. He recommended that the new schemes should be fairer by smoothing the current disparities between high and low-income earners and ensuring that benefits are distributed more equally, which was why he recommended a move from final salary provision to career average revalued earnings—CARE—schemes. Finally, he recommended stronger governance provisions for the new schemes so that scheme members and the public could understand how the schemes were run and what they cost.
We accepted all 27 of Lord Hutton’s recommendations as the basis for discussion with trade unions and scheme member representatives across the public service, and designed our blueprint reference scheme in a way that reflected the recommendations of the Hutton report without any cherry-picking. Our aim was to strike a deal that would last, unchanged, for 25 years. Talks with the unions took place on all elements of that deal. I should stress that the Government did not do all the talking in those meetings—we listened carefully, too. Agreeing the design of these pensions has taken a considerable cross-Government effort over the past 18 months. The Minister for the Cabinet Office, the Home Secretary, the Lord Chancellor, the Education Secretary, the Defence Secretary, the Communities and Local Government Secretary and the former Health Secretary worked hard to understand the concerns of the trade unions and member representatives in their sectors.