UK Parliament / Open data

Pension Schemes Bill [HL]

Proceeding contribution from Baroness Donaghy (Labour) in the House of Lords on Wednesday, 26 February 2020. It occurred during Debate on bills and Committee proceeding on Pension Schemes Bill [HL].

I have listened carefully to the debate and cannot help but think that this is not sufficiently fleet of foot to prevent those such as BHS and Carillion—there is recent past history on this—which were basically giant Ponzi schemes towards the end, where they were paying dividends instead of funding the pension scheme, had deliberately obscure governance rules and left their pensioners bereft of a considerable proportion of their money. Is this system sufficiently fleet of foot? Would it take account of a company which then decided to sell itself to another person for, for the sake of argument, £1? Would it help to cover the situations covered by the amendments? It does not sound to me as though we are doing anything different from just saying, “Everybody has the right to the appropriate dividends.” How do we know that those dividends are appropriate, and how do we have power for the regulator to ensure that there are not some really bad guys out there?

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
802 c142GC 
Session
2019-21
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords Grand Committee
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