My Lords, like my noble friend who has just spoken, I, too, have serious reservations about this amendment. Indeed, I am opposed to it. I take that view in the light of experience—some eight or nine years on the Front Bench on work and pensions and as a former chairman of a pretty large company pension scheme. This amendment would effectively remove the discretion of the trustees to exercise their powers in a way that is favourable or unfavourable to a particular group of people in the pension scheme. We do not know the exact cost, although the noble Lord, Lord Alli, put it at £80 million. I leave it to my noble friend on the Front Bench to say what the effect would be on public finances but the reality is that this would affect a number of pension funds.
We have to look at this in context. If there was one individual disaster, more than any other of Gordon Brown’s time as Chancellor of the Exchequer, it was the change that he made to the taxation of company pensions towards the beginning of the Labour Government. The result has, undoubtedly, been the decimation of final salary pension schemes and a transfer to defined contribution schemes. Either way, we have seen the finances of pension funds seriously deteriorating and, in many cases, funds giving up the final salary scheme or giving it up as far as new members are concerned.
As the noble Lord pointed out, a number of trustees have gone along with what the amendment does. However, some have not, and we must leave them the discretion. There may be good reasons why they have not, not least financial ones. It may be that some scheme is tottering—as many have been over the past 10 or 15 years—to the point where it needs to be decided whether the scheme should be closed or changed from a final salary to a defined benefit scheme and so on. It is wrong retrospectively to put a charge on the funds in such a scheme, to which the existing members are contributing but not the people coming into the scheme. Indeed, if we were to accept the amendment, we may find people in a same-sex marriage are brought into the final salary part of the company scheme when others, in the defined contribution part of the scheme, have not been allowed the same benefits. That would, I think, be unfair.
We should leave it to the overall discretion of the trustees. No doubt, over time, it is likely that many more will create the situation that the noble Lord, Lord Alli, speaks of, if they have not yet. However, we should leave it to the discretion of the scheme and the trustees of the scheme—it is their responsibility—and not retrospectively impose a cost on those schemes. That, I think, would be wrong.