Given the current cost of living crisis, it is certainly the case that people struggling to set aside money for the future need access to pension schemes that they can trust to give good value for money and to provide them with a decent income in retirement. We welcome the improved opportunities that we hope the Bill will provide, as we have throughout the debates on the Bill.
A lot of important detail is still to come; this is an enabling Bill. However, as interventions from my hon. Friends the Members for Edmonton (Mr. Love) and for Central Ayrshire (Mr Donohoe) and from the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight) have pointed out, it is pretty extraordinary and very unsatisfactory that in an important Bill, which has in total 55 clauses, we should at this very late stage be debating 33 Government new clauses and 72 new Government amendments.
The Minister knows very well that this is not a field in which haste is fruitful. He attempted in his response to one intervention to make a virtue of the fact that he was “picking these things up in real time.” What he actually means is “making it up on the hoof.” I do not think that
a good way to legislate on pensions. The scope for mistakes in drafting very technical measures such as these is too great.
The point of having proper parliamentary scrutiny is to spot problems early and to allow for them to be corrected. As it is, there will, of course, be many mistakes in the 70 pages, or whatever, of new material in front of the House for our brief debate this afternoon. We can only hope that Members in the other place will spot them and be able to put them right, but things are bound to go wrong. Having said that, I think that the risks are significantly less in this group of amendments than they are in the next, on which I will have more to say. However, it is troubling that there is so much new and technical material here.
I wanted to ask about one particular point. As the Minister has said, the new clauses are imposing new obligations on scheme trustees. As I understand it—I may be mistaken; if I am, I know that the Minister will correct me—the Government have not provided an estimate of the cost of meeting those obligations for scheme trustees. I wonder why not; normally, I would have expected there to be an impact assessment with an estimate. Will the Minister comment, first, on whether I am right—that there is no estimate or at least none has been published so far—and, if so, the reason for that?
Will the Minister set out his intentions over the numerous sets of regulations that are envisaged? Is he able to tell us at this stage which of those sets of regulations are going to be subject to the affirmative as opposed to the negative procedure, so that we can be assured of future debate about those more detailed provisions when they become available?