I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, and the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, for their support and for opening up the debate, in particular on Amendment 33. I thought that the Minster made a bit of a Freudian slip there, because she wanted me not to press Amendments 34, 36 and 37 and then realised that she should have
included Amendment 33. In fact, I do not think that is what she meant—she means that we need a further discussion on this.
There is a really important issue that we want to sort out. The current regulatory phraseology may fit the legal requirements of the current situation but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, said, the game’s a bogey—that is a Scottish expression. It is no longer as it was; we are in a different world now with auto-enrolment and all the ways in which technologies are coming forward. Fintech is the word on everybody’s lips in the sector. We need to think harder about future-proofing the current legislation. At its heart, sadly, this problem is probably of the Government’s own making. Had they decided to stick with the two-body solution, we would probably not have had this problem, because we could then have had different regulatory structures for debt and for pensions or other activities. Because they have been bolted together, however, the issue is not going to go away.
If we are to have an integrated, warm-key, hot-key, all-singing, all-dancing issue, we need to face up to it and be very clear about it. It may be true that the people the Minister talked to did not have difficulties with this, but I can tell her that, out there in the country, people do not follow you when you start talking about regulated and non-regulated advice. In the regulated pensions area, if it is possible that regulated pensions advisers cannot tell people what to do, but it is also possible that regulated debt advisers can tell them what to do—it happens—then we have a problem and we need to resolve it. If we are to be seamless, why settle for less than that? We should get it right but, with that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.