My hon. Friend makes an important point and he is right to pick up on that omission. When we think about retirement, we should be thinking not just about pensions, but about a person’s income in retirement. Some of that will take the form of state pension; some will be interest on savings accounts; and some may come through work—depending on what age we retire at, and how we phase in our retirement. Certainly housing is a valuable asset, too, and very good work is being done by a number of organisations to look at how housing can be used, but we are still some way off having something that people will recognise as a good way to use their housing assets. As I say that, I feel a letter coming on from my former colleague Nigel Lawson on this point, but there is more work to be done in respect of how people view housing as an asset and how they can utilise that asset in retirement to supplement their income. We need to build out from the guidance guarantee, and more work will need to be done on that in the coming months.
I want to mention a point that has been raised with me and that I will probably talk about in more detail when the complementary tax Bill to this comes through
later in the year: we must think about what sort of outcomes we expect people to see in retirement. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Pensions referred to a decade of innovation, but he will recollect that when we introduced reforms to liberalise the open market option, and to make that more of the default, there were some unforeseen challenges from that, and we have seen some of the consequences and the report published by the Financial Services Consumer Panel. I do think there is a responsibility on industry, the Government and the regulator to do some thinking about what good looks like under the new reforms and how we can help shape that post-retirement market. That would form an important part of the work.
I commend the Government on this comprehensive package of pension reforms. They will form a key part of our legacy, and they are an important way of expressing what we have achieved as a Government in setting down long-term foundations to help people to take more responsibility for their savings in retirement, to help them to save more in their retirement and to give them the freedom and choice that they need in their retirement. The Bill is part of that package, and I look forward to seeing how the schemes develop to help to provide people with more certainty in regard to their future pension incomes, when all they have seen up to now is increased uncertainty.
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