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Mr. Darling: My hon. Friend is right. If there had been the transparency that now exists, many of the problems that occurred in the late 1980s would have been avoided.
Mr. Darling: The hon. Gentleman is desperate to intervene. According to the Register of Members'
Interests, he is well qualified to intervene on this matter. No doubt he will draw the attention of the House to that if he makes a speech.
Mr. Butterfill: The hon. Gentleman is right: I advise the Independent Financial Advisers Association and the British Insurance and Investment Brokers Association. However, that is not the point that I wish to make. Will the hon. Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours) reconsider what he said? I did not at any time oppose the disclosure of commission. In 1986, I opposed purely the disclosure of commission when it was often necessary to disclose all the other costs of direct selling companies. In many cases, such costs were much higher than those incurred by companies that employed independent financial advisers. I urged the Committee to legislate to disclose all the costs of all companies and not single out one area, as the hon. Gentleman wished to do.
Mr. Darling: It is interesting to note that Opposition Members, whether on the Front Bench or the Back Benches, are trying to disclaim all knowledge of what went on in the 1980s. I am intrigued that hon. Members such as the hon. Member for Bournemouth, West, who opposed the disclosure of commission, always said that such opposition was for the greater good and that many other things needed to be known as well. I would not have minded if they had argued at that time in favour of disclosing not just commission but all other factors in the make-up of the sale of a product. That is important.
Mr. Butterfill: Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Darling: The hon. Gentleman should contain himself. I may give way to him later. I was about to be nice to him, so perhaps he will sit patiently. In debates on the Finance Bill and in other debates, he can make helpful suggestions. In debates on a Bill on financial services, which we propose to introduce during this Parliament, I am sure that his comments will be helpful.
Mr. Butterfill: The right hon. Gentleman is completely distorting the facts and what I said. I urged the Committee to disclose all costs, including commission paid to salesmen, but it was the Labour party and the hon. Member for Workington who did not want all costs disclosed--the hon. Gentleman wanted only insurance salesmen's commission costs disclosed. It was precisely because I felt that all costs should be disclosed that I made a principled stand on the entire subject.
Mr. Darling: I can see now why the hon. Gentleman is retained at such generous rates. He clearly does his best for the industry.
Mrs. Teresa Gorman (Billericay): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Darling: Perhaps I could deal with one point at a time; at some point, I should like to get on to the matters raised by the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden.
I was making the point that many people, including the hon. Member for Bournemouth, West (Mr. Butterfill), used to argue against disclosure of commission simply
because they did not want that aspect disclosed. The House may remember that we are discussing this matter because my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, Central (Mr. Davies) raised the impact of commission on the selling of financial products. I think that all of us agree that the regulators need to examine the matter. I am all in favour of giving incentives to sales forces to sell products, but we have to watch the impact of those incentives and their propensity for encouraging the misselling of pensions.
Mrs. Gorman:
Is it not a fact that the people about whose plight the right hon. Gentleman is agonising, shedding some crocodile tears along the way of course, are the very people whose individual pension funds are to be raided by the Government--about 5 million of them? They are paying modest amounts of around £1,000 a year, and they will have to find another £100 to £150 a year to keep their savings intact--because of the depredations that the Government are about to inflict on them.
Mr. Darling:
The answer is no.
The point that I was drawing to the attention of the House is that many people who were missold pensions have still not received the compensation that is due to them. I say this in response to the point that the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden made, at which the hon. Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman) may have been hinting. Frankly, I have little time for the argument that is now advanced by some pension companies that they could be making great progress, if only there had not been any change to the corporation tax regime. That might have been a statable case had they been making any progress, but many of them have not.
When hon. Members read the parliamentary answer of the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, which will now be published, of course, they will find that the progress has been lamentably slow. In nearly every company, the percentage of cases that has been dealt with is in single figures, and that cannot be satisfactory. I hope that the pension companies that follow these proceedings will understand that the public will not tolerate such lamentable progress, when so many people are awaiting redress and cannot understand why on earth there is a delay.
Mr. Oliver Letwin (West Dorset):
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
We will continue to publish regularly companies' progress, or lack of progress, because we believe, unlike the Conservative party--presumably, if it had believed that openness was a good idea, it would have done something about it--that openness is essential. I should like to move on to some of the other points raised, but, as the hon. Gentleman seems desperate to intervene, let him do so.
Mr. Letwin:
I was merely going to inquire whether, after some 15 minutes of eloquence, the right hon. Gentleman intends to move to the subject of the debate.
Mr. Darling:
If the hon. Gentleman had sat quietly, I would have got to the points about which he asks some
The other step that the Government are taking, which the previous Government would not take, despite being pressed to do so, is substantially to reform the Financial Services Act 1986, to ensure that we have a proper regulation system, an end to self-regulation and regulation in the public interest, which will benefit both the industry and the public. We are committed to doing that, and legislation will be introduced during this Parliament, but Conservative Members, despite this debate, still cannot answer this question: why did they so nothing about the problem when they had all the time in the world to do so?
Let me deal with another point to which reference is made in the Opposition motion but to which, although I may be wrong about this, the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden, the Opposition spokesman, did not refer--the windfall tax. I am interested in this because, when the shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury summed up for the Opposition at the end the Budget debate, he did not mention the windfall tax either. Over the past year or two, and certainly during the general election campaign, I got the impression that the Conservative party thought that the tax was so bad that it would form the centrepiece of its opposition to us in government, yet, in two major speeches, Opposition spokesmen did not mention the tax.
Mr. Bernard Jenkin (North Essex):
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Darling:
Not just now. I do not want to be accused of taking up the valuable time of the House answering Conservative Members' questions.
It is interesting that, in the Opposition motion--never mind Conservative Members' speeches--the Conservatives are no longer defending the privatised utilities, and no wonder, because they have accepted the Budget proposals. I notice that their shares have increased since the Budget, which suggests that what we are doing is reasonable, but the new line from the Opposition is that the tax is an attack on pension funds.
I want to make a basic point. The reason we have implemented the windfall tax is to fund a programme to get people back into work, which will enable them to make a contribution for themselves and their families, to save for their retirement and to contribute towards their pensions, so the tax is a sensible step. The Government have raised a windfall tax that will get people into work. Instead of paying increased social security bills, about which the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden certainly knows something, we can give people the opportunity to contribute. The windfall tax is entirely justified for that reason, and is widely accepted to be so. Given the strength of feeling on the Conservative Benches over the past few years, I am surprised that the tax was not referred to, although it was in the Opposition motion.
One matter was mentioned: the allegation that there was an absence of consultation. The Opposition motion contains the words
"shoddy, hastily prepared and ill-thought-out".
I have heard those words before and not too long ago. I heard them in March when the then Government introduced basic pension plus, which I do not remember being introduced with much consultation. In fact, there was not even a statement in the House.
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