This group of amendments contains a long list of disparate topics. To give the House a feel for what we are discussing, it includes an attempt to limit the scope of automatic enrolment, the transfer of small pension pots, short service refunds, the vexed issue of pension scheme charges, issues with governance and administration, the decumulation of pension pots, the specific issue of rail pensions and the pension protection fund compensation cap. I shall do my best to whizz
through all those issues to minimise or obviate as far as is possible the need for me to return to the Dispatch Box on this group.
I should start on a note of consensus. This part of the Bill deals with private pensions and I think that the House would agree that the process of automatic enrolment into workplace pensions is going exceptionally well. The process started a year ago. British industry has automatically enrolled about 1.7 million employees into workplace pensions. The rate of not opting out, or of staying in, has been far better than anybody predicted. Our survey evidence suggests that of the order of nine in 10 workers have chosen to remain in their workplace pensions. That is something that we should all welcome.
The Bill is designed to improve that situation further and to deal with some unfinished business. Although the principle of automatic enrolment was legislated for in the previous Parliament, many issues were not dealt with. If those are not dealt with, it will undermine the success of automatic enrolment.
Amendment 53 relates to the scope of automatic enrolment. Clause 34 gives the Government the power to exclude some people from the employer duty for automatic enrolment. I will give the House a flavour of the sorts of people that we might be talking about. In automatic enrolment, we have sought to strike a balance between setting out the rules at the start and giving employers and the industry certainty, and learning and listening and then changing the rules when we have got something wrong or when something needs to be refined or streamlined. We could have changed the rules and constantly tweaked things, or we could have said at the start, “These are the rules for the next five or six years until everybody’s in. Go and deal with it”, but we tried to strike a balance.
As we have learned, the rules require employers to put a certain set of people into workplace pensions who may immediately opt out. For example, people with what is called enhanced or fixed tax protection status—high net wealth individuals—could face a tax surcharge if their pension pot exceeds the lifetime allowance. In general, such individuals will want to opt straight back out of the scheme, and their employers have said, “Why are you making us put these people into pension schemes? We all know they are going to opt out, and indeed they will be cross with us if they fail to opt out and later face a tax penalty.” At the moment, the Government do not have the power to enable firms not to enrol those people, so clause 34 provides the power to exempt them from enrolment.
The second example concerns those who have already given notice. Someone may have given a month’s notice, but in the middle of that period the Government require the employer to put them in a pension scheme. As Members will understand, that is silly, because that person will probably opt out immediately. In any case, asking firms to enrol people who have already given notice does not do much for our relations with the CBI. Those are examples of where we have given employers a comprehensive, rigid legal duty that creates perverse outcomes. Clause 34 therefore allows employers to exempt certain categories of workers, and I have mentioned the sorts of examples it would cover.
Amendment 53 says, “That’s all very well, but we don’t want you using the power to exempt categories of business such as small and medium-sized firms.” Leaving
aside the fact that the amendment does not define an SME and it is not clear who would be covered, and that any amendment with “such as” suggests it is a bit vague to begin with, in responding to the spirit of the amendment I assure the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Gregg McClymont) and the House that the Government have no intention of using the power to exclude small and medium-sixed firms. That is not what this is about.
Amendment 53 is otiose, because if we were the evil Government that the hon. Gentleman thinks we are and wanted to exclude small and medium-sized firms, we could do that anyway. The staging schedule is set in statutory instrument, subject to negative procedure. Therefore, if we wanted to exclude Britain’s small firms, we would have only to produce a statutory instrument that would say that small firms will be required to stage in 2099. That would not even be subject to a vote in the House. If the amendment seeks to stop the Government doing something that, in any case, we do not want to do, it would not work; we could still do it even if the amendment were successful. I hope I have reassured the House that amendment 53 is unnecessary, because we do not plan to do such a thing. Secondly, the amendment is not well drafted because it is not clear who it means. Thirdly, even if passed, it would not achieve the desired objective. An unnecessary, poorly drafted amendment that does not work should probably not be approved by the House.
Amendments 38 to 52 concern what happens to small pension pots—an issue that was not addressed when the original legislation for automatic enrolment was drawn up. People change jobs perhaps 10 or 11 times in their working life, and they leave behind small pension pots. From the Australian experience, we know that can mean lots of people losing track of their pension pots and not engaging with pension saving because they have large numbers of small, silly pension pots all over the place.
Australia is often mentioned as having one of the world’s best pension systems, and the Australians say that the one thing they wish they had addressed at the start was small dormant pension pots. The Australian Government have been going at this for longer than we have, and they estimate that they have 5 million lost pension accounts containing 20 billion Australian dollars. It is a serious issue. Clause 29 in schedule 16 sets out the Government’s response to the issue, which is what we call pot follows member. When someone moves from an auto-enrolment defined contribution pot to another one, their pot—as long as it is below a £10,000 threshold—automatically follows them unless they opt for that not to be the case.
Interestingly, Nick Sherry, former Australian superannuation Minister and highly regarded in the field said of pot follows member:
“It’s the only practical way. It’s better off”—
because the money is in the worker’s last account—
“which is why I think it’s the only practical solution”.
We are delighted to have Nick Sherry’s support for our approach, as well as that of the Association of British Insurers. In the briefing sent to hon. Members the ABI welcomes the fact that the Bill includes provisions for the automatic transfer of small pension pots, which will lead to greater engagement and help people make savings
decisions that are right for them and should lead to greater income in retirement. That is a welcome level of support for the proposition.
The Opposition amendments suggest a different route and would mean that when someone changes job, the dormant pension pot is automatically transferred to a third-party pension scheme called an aggregator. As I understand it, there would not be just one aggregator but multiple aggregators, and I have multiple concerns about that. First, such a policy would clearly lead to greater fragmentation of pension saving—it must do. Let us imagine the simplest example in which someone moves from firm A to firm B, and works only for two firms in their working life. In our model, the small dormant pension pot follows them from firm A to firm B—or scheme A to scheme B—and they end up with a single pension pot. In the model suggested by the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East, the dormant pension pot gets shunted off to some third-party provider with whom the employee has never engaged. They therefore have a pot with the current employer and with the third-party provider.
We are trying not just to hoover up small pension pots but to get people engaged in pension saving. The problem with someone shunting their money off to a third-party provider, perhaps one they did not choose—there is not much detail in the hon. Gentleman’s model, but I do not think it involves a person choosing a third-party provider, although perhaps it does—is that they get a letter from a pension company they have never heard of saying, “Guess what, we’ve got your dormant pension pot.” It is not exactly a ransom note, but it might be the first that someone knows about it, and that will not lead them to become engaged.
Under our model, someone’s pension savings are with their current employer. That is what they are interested in and where workplace pension engagement takes place. We therefore believe that our model provides better consolidation of pension saving and better engagement. Our model also saves on the cost of running pension schemes, compared with the model set out in the amendments. With a pot size limit of £10,000—obviously our published research relates to the £2,000 pot size limit on the aggregator model—which is the same across the two systems, we still estimate that the aggregate approach will achieve only half the cumulative administrative savings by 2050 of our pot follows member system. While aggregators are worth a look—we considered that option—it is clear that pot follows member is the best solution.
There is an issue of what happens if money is automatically transferred from a “good” scheme to a “bad” scheme, and I accept that point. That is why we are regulating for scheme quality. It should not just be a worry that someone’s small pension pot gets auto-transferred to a bad scheme; it should be a worry that an entire work force have been auto-enrolled into a bad scheme. We should not have bad schemes and must deal with that. That is why we are tackling pension scheme quality, which includes a range of issues such as governance, investment, costs and charges. In a few moments I will have news for my hon. Friends and the House about what action we are taking on charges. For those reasons, we are not convinced by the multiple aggregator model, as it is catchily known. We believe that the someone changing job and their money
following them is a simple, attractive notion that I commend to the House. I therefore ask the House to reject amendments 38 to 52.
Amendments 5 to 10 are largely technical and deal with short service refunds. There is a category of money purchase pension schemes through which someone who has worked for a firm for under two years can have their money back when they leave. That is not in the spirit of what we are trying to achieve through our pension reforms. We want people, even those who put in relatively small amounts of pension savings, to accumulate that, build up what I call a big fat pot, and have a decent retirement. Short service refunds fly in the face of the view that even modest pension savings are worth having, and we therefore propose to eliminate them. The danger with the current legislation is that although someone joined to a pension scheme through a contract has 30 days to opt out, under the Bill they would be in the scheme on day one, and a day’s or month’s worth of pension contribution would be lodged. On purely pragmatic grounds we took that view that we ought to apply the same 30-day rule to short service refunds. Clause 32 abolishes short service refunds, and technical amendments 5 to 10 deliver a 30-day breathing space so that someone who is a member of a scheme for fewer than 30 days can receive a refund of what are essentially nominal contributions. I hope that amendments 5 to 10 will be welcomed across the House.
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One central issue in the debate on this group of amendments is pension scheme charges. The charge quoted on a pension scheme might be 1%, which sounds pretty innocent, because if 99p in the pound of a person’s money goes into their pension, the chances are that they will believe they are getting a good deal. However, pension scheme charges are compounded, so 1% of the fund is taken out in the first year, 1% of what is there is taken out in the second year, and so on. The Government estimate that the cumulative impact of charges can be very substantial, despite apparently innocuous, low-sounding charges.
Some attempts have been made to tackle charges. The previous Government set a charge cap on stakeholder pensions at what now looks like an astonishingly high level. To remind the House, someone who takes out a stakeholder pension can be within the previous Government’s caps if they pay a charge of 1.5% for 10 years followed by 1% thereafter. That is acceptable and regarded as qualifying for the stakeholder stamp. The then Government said, “That’s great. As long as your pension scheme is charging you less than 1.5% for the first 10 years and 1% thereafter, the box is ticked and it is a good pension scheme.” I do not regard charges of 1.5% for 10 years and 1% for the rest as good value for money. This Government can and will do better.
Why is 1% significant? Suppose you save, through your working life, £100 a month into a pension—I am not posing this question to you directly, Mr Speaker, but rhetorically—how much of your pension pot will have gone compared with the situation for a pension that has no charges? If the charge is 1% of £100 a month, the total charge for a year will be £12 or something, which does not sound like very much. However,
it accumulates to more than £160,000—the difference between no charges and a 1% charge on savings of £100 a month is £160,000, which comes out of the pension pot. That is why I regard the charge caps that the previous Government sought to apply to stakeholder pensions—they applied no charge cap whatever for automatic enrolment—as alarmingly high and alarmingly gentle on the pensions industry.
I believe this Government can do better than that. I am therefore pleased to say that tomorrow we will publish a consultation document on charges in automatic enrolment pension schemes. We have waited to do that because we wanted to see the Office of Fair Trading report, which was published in September. It looked at the market and found that the demand side of the workplace pensions market was one of the worst it had ever encountered—that is almost verbatim what it said.
We do not regulate the price of baked beans because the market works. People shop around and buy a product they want, and they can choose a different one if they do not like it. The market for workplace pensions is not like that. The demand side of the model is very weak, because the people who pay the charges, the scheme members, are not the same as the people who choose the pension—the employer chooses the pension, but the member pays the charges. Even though the employee has an incentive to want a low-charge pension scheme, they are not the consumer. The employer is the consumer. Employers might be oblivious to charges, they might not care, or they might want to get rid of the hassle of choosing a pension scheme and therefore choose what they are offered. In that situation, the employee has a binary choice: stay in or get out. They cannot shop around or negotiate the charges down. It is a take-it-or-leave-it situation.
It is worse. Not only are employees automatically enrolled, and therefore in by default, but their money is invested by default into a default fund. Overwhelmingly, the money of the people I am talking about ends up in default funds. They are double-defaulted—they are defaulted into pension saving and the money is defaulted into default investment funds. We absolutely must protect the consumer interests of those individuals. Therefore, the consultation that opens tomorrow will consider how far we can get with disclosure.
Some of the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East suggest that we need tens of thousands of pension funds telling the pension regulator what their charges are. That would not be great. If I am a scheme member who has just been auto-enrolled or who has fairly passively remained in my scheme, I will be passively put into a default pension fund, but somebody somewhere—Brighton, for example—has a website with a charge figure on it. That is not great and does not really help. We need something better and tougher than that.
We are therefore proposing a range of options on how far we can get with better disclosure and transparency, and on an absolute charge cap. I can tell the House that we will include in our consultation the option of a 0.75% charge cap on workplace pension schemes. That is a tougher charge cap than the Opposition have called for—they chose 1%. Their suggestion of a 1% cap was either based on an exhaustive investigation of the evidence and the data, or chosen because it was a nice round number. It was one or the other. The Government
believe we should consider going further. We know that not enough people are saving for their retirement, and therefore that every penny they get into their pension has to turn into as much pension as possible. That is why we will consult on tough action on charges.