My Lords, I briefly pay tribute to all involved in this Bill, including Margaret Ferrier MP, who steered it through the other place, and the noble Baroness, Lady Redfern, who has done the same for us here.
As the noble Baroness said, my noble friend Lady Drake and I can now stop badgering the Minister for a Bill on GMP equalisation. Although the Government Whips never did come through with government time, I commend the DWP for its wholehearted support of a Private Member’s Bill that happened to cover just the right territory at just the right time.
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I am sorry to have missed the earlier stages because of Covid, but I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Merron, who did such a marvellous job in my place. There are a couple of outstanding issues, such as the position of pension schemes already in the Pension Protection Fund, raised by my noble friend Lady Drake, and the concerns raised by the Delegated Powers Committee, to which Ministers were only able
to respond yesterday. However, we do not wish to hold up the Bill, so we will take these offline and hope to deal with them with the Minister before regulation. The key thing is that we are finally about to pass a Bill which the Government are confident will give the necessary legal certainty to schemes seeking to equalise guaranteed minimum pensions. This is good news, and we are pleased to support it.