I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
It gives me great pleasure to move this Bill, alongside my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, as the latest measure in our groundbreaking pension reforms. In the run-up to the Queen’s Speech, there was some suggestion that the Government had run out of steam. Indeed, the phrase was coined that this was a zombie Parliament. I have to say that, with not one but two items of pensions legislation in the Queen’s Speech—the Pension Schemes Bill and its sister Bill, the pensions tax Bill—we will be very busy over the remaining months of this Parliament taking the pensions system to a far better place. I can assure the House that there are no zombies at the Department for Work and Pensions.
The Pension Schemes Bill will improve the system in two ways: it will give people much greater flexibility on how and when they access their savings, and it will enable innovation in the pensions industry, to better meet the needs of businesses and individuals.
Before I run through the principal features of the Bill, I want to set out the context of the pensions reform that we have undertaken as a coalition Government in these past four years, because it is not possible to have an effective pensions system without an effective foundation. That is why the Pensions Act 2014, which introduces the new state pension, is so vital. A single, simple, decent pension, getting the vast majority of people clear of means-testing, provides a firm foundation for retirement saving. The reform was long overdue and it will transform the pensions landscape of this country.
The second crucial measure is the introduction of the triple lock, ensuring that for both today’s and tomorrow’s pensioners the long-term, decades-long decline in the value of the basic state pension has been halted. Under this coalition Government, the state pension is now a bigger share of the national average wage than at any stage in the past 20 years—a record of which we can all be proud. At current inflation rates, though new figures are due out shortly, we would anticipate that the triple lock will bite again this year, providing further protection to the nation’s pensioners.
Having established a firm and decent state pension foundation, the next stage in our reforms was to ensure mass membership of workplace pensions—again reversing decades of decline. I was delighted, therefore, that the most recent statistics showed that, for the first time in decades, we have significantly reversed the fall in membership of workplace pension schemes. The successful introduction of automatic enrolment, filling the many gaps in the policy left to us by the previous Government, has now seen 4 million people successfully enrolled into workplace pensions, with more being added with every passing week.