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Sir John Butterfill: I am listening very carefully to what the right hon. Gentleman says, but I think that he
might be in danger of over-egging his pudding. Is he aware that some 4.6 million British workers are still in defined benefit schemes, and that we are talking about 60,000 people who are affected by the calamity of ASW and other such cases? It is therefore necessary to keep this matter in proportion.
Alan Howarth: I shall come to some of my concerns about the commitment of British industry to defined benefit schemes a little later in my speech.
The Government's main administrative and legislative effort at this stage, as we see in the Bill, is to create a pension protection fund. I understand, of course, why they want to do so, but the proposal bristles with difficulty, morally and practically. Even if the badly run schemes have in due course to pay a bigger levy, why should the well run schemes be required to contribute to a fund to bail them out? In any case, might not the fund indeed offer false hope? The so-called Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation in America has gone sharply into deficit, with all concerned crossing their fingers and hoping that a rising stock market will float them off the rocks. The scale of payments that will need to be levied from UK pension funds to provide the guarantee that the Government proclaim may be such as to drive more employers into abandoning the very model—the defined benefit scheme—that the Government want to prop up. The bureaucracy involved in a scheme of differential levies—as in the supervision of scheme-specific funding—will surely be onerous.
It seems to me that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and my hon. Friend the pensions Minister may be expending their powder and shot in fighting the last war. Instead, we should be welcoming the shift to defined contribution schemes and concentrating on devising an appropriate regime for them.
There will be no reversing the trend away from defined benefit—DB—schemes. With the altering age balance in the workforce, the maturing of schemes, the disappearance of surpluses and greater longevity, more and more companies will be unwilling to shoulder the cost and risk of final salary schemes.
Policy by successive Governments—the taxation of surpluses; regulations far more burdensome than in the USA; FRS 17, which means that volatility in the value of pension funds affects balance sheets; and European Union discrimination legislation—has been driving employers away from DB schemes. Nor need we lament that. It is not in employees' interests to be in unsustainable DB schemes or for their firms to be rendered uncompetitive by the cost of a DB commitment. Final salary schemes make less sense with the need for many people to work for more years and to retire gradually. Defined contribution—DC—schemes make more sense in a flexible labour market and for individuals who expect to change jobs relatively frequently, or who are low earners, or who depend on overtime or other payments which are not consolidated into pensionable pay. For all these reasons, the change to DC is happening.
Adam Price (East Carmarthen and Dinefwr) (PC): I can think of few professions in which people would
expect to change jobs more frequently than this one. Would the right hon. Gentleman support a motion in the House to move our pension scheme from defined benefit to defined contribution?
Alan Howarth: The hon. Gentleman tempts me down an interesting avenue, but I shall resist the temptation.
For all the reasons that I have just outlined, the change to DC is happening, and I would have hoped that the Bill would be focusing on the urgent need to provide a framework and standards for DC schemes so that they can perform as they could do and need to do. There is an obvious agenda here. We need to ensure that sufficient contributions are made by employers and savers, that appropriate investment options are available, that information, financial education and financial planning advice are available, that the regulation of DC schemes is simplified to replace the four distinct regulatory regimes that we have at the moment, that there is ease of transferability, and that people are helped to buy the right annuity at the right rate. It is vital to raise the standards of DC schemes if we are to avert widespread poverty in retirement and huge rises in public expenditure.
The Association of British Insurers calculates that, on present trends, 80 per cent. of the population will rely on means-tested benefits by 2050. If that is correct, this is the impending pensions crisis. Twenty per cent. of workers are not saving at all, and many more are not saving enough, either because they lack the money to do so, or because they are baffled by the complexities of pensions, or because they do not realise how important it is for them to save.
The DC regime that I want the Government to bring in will be strongly paternalist. I welcome the provisions in the Bill for a new regulator, but I want the regulator to do more than the Government may wish.
To build up a pension large enough to prevent a painful fall in disposable income during retirement, people need, at any rate from their early 30s, to put in not less than 15 per cent. of gross earnings annually. The responsibility should be split fairly between saver, employer and Government. The ABI has found that when an employer contributes at least 5 per cent., the proportion of people saving for pensions rises from 13 per cent. to 69 per cent. Employers should be compelled to contribute a minimum percentage of pay, and incentivised by Government, through a tax credit or relief of national insurance contributions, to contribute more. Employers' contributions have of course been falling in the transition from DB to DC: the average employer's contribution to contributory DB schemes is 10.1 per cent., but to DC schemes it is 5.8 per cent. The Government should also contribute, but by way of grant rather than tax relief. As Sandler, Altmann and others have noted, tax relief is highly regressive. In 2002, of £14 billion worth of tax relief, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, West noted in his superb speech, half went to the richest 10 per cent. and a quarter to the richest 2.5 per cent. It is neither just nor efficient to provide the biggest tax relief to those who are most able and most disposed to save. Grants would enable the Government to provide extra incentives to save for people on lower earnings and would have a flexibility which tax relief does not have.
If the Department for Work and Pensions thinks that that would be sensible, I wish it well in its negotiations across Whitehall. The Department of Trade and Industry no doubt thinks that compulsory employers' contributions would be an unacceptable burden on business. To be sure, we should not impose social costs on the scale of Germany and France, where they destroy jobs. After all, near-continuous employment is the precondition of building any decent pension. But we should say plainly to employers in the UK that they should make a certain level of contribution to pensions as part of our social contract. Good employers already do that. Why should they be undercut in the labour market by bad employers who do not?
We also need a more extensive, energetic and urgent programme of action from the Treasury. I look forward to the Finance Bill. The Treasury needs to intervene far more decisively in asset allocation. Pension funds, as experience has miserably shown, have been excessively exposed to equities and the risks inherent in equity investment. I am dismayed to read—I hope that it is not correct—that Ministers now propose to change the solvency rules to allow fund managers to invest more in equities. Can it be right for the Government to encourage pension scheme trustees, so many of whom lost their fiduciary gamble in recent years, to stake yet more of other people's money in the equity casino? Compounding untaxed interest and capital gains on fixed interest investments in a low-inflation environment will provide a considerable return, and a safe return, on savings over a working lifetime. The Government should be explaining that and steering savers towards sensible asset allocation.
The Government should ensure that regulations comparable to the American "safe harbour" regulations for DC schemes are put in place and that best practice guidelines are issued. Prudential supervision needs to be exercised to ensure that a sufficient variety of investment products is available to individual savers to match the variety of their personal needs. Trustees, as has been noted, need training. Savers need financial planning advice—Sandler is dangerously wrong to suggest that the creation of simple and "low risk" products, not all of which are so low risk in reality, obviates the need for advice. The Sandler products may not be suitable at all for people who would do better to pay off debt or buy an ISA. People will need advice both on whether they would be wise to buy any Sandler product and, if so, which. As Dr. Ros Altmann has put it, there is a danger of a new "misbuying" scandal. Besides, such is the lack of confidence in pension products because of their complexity, past scandals and the highly publicised collapse of schemes, that people will need to be encouraged to invest in any of these new products. The Government must ensure that everyone receives financial education, information in intelligible terms about their pension options, and competent independent advice. I am glad that the Government recognise the importance of "informed choice". They must not underestimate the scale of the exercise required to achieve this. The cost will have to be met. Are the Government willing to provide a tax credit for employers who make suitable education, information and advice available in the workplace? At present, not only can employers not get tax relief on the cost to them of providing pensions advice, but such advice may be treated as a taxable benefit for employees.
While DC occupational schemes are preferable to DB, there is a case to be made against occupational schemes altogether—whether DB or DC, they inhibit the labour market. We need people to be able to move as flexibly as possible between employers and sectors. Occupational schemes are predicated on an obsolete model of lifetime employment in one particular occupation.
It would be better if everyone built up their own personal and portable pension. Chile and Singapore have adopted such a policy. The 401k schemes in the USA, which the Bush Administration have encouraged and which are increasingly popular, offer another model, which is likely to be more applicable here. I believe that we need a fully fledged system of personal and portable pensions as the centrepiece of provision. This would require strong incentivisation and intrusive regulation in the approval of funds, in ensuring a suitable diversity of funds and to enable risk to be spread, in safeguarding savers' interests against imprudent investment by fund managers and trustees, and in ensuring competition between funds. It would require full transparency of commissions, charges, transactions, valuations and projections. An inescapable obligation would have to be placed on employers to pay at least 5 per cent. of pay into each worker's individual fund. Similarly, the Government must oblige the self-employed, 28 per cent. of whom are making no personal pension provision, to save.
Among the virtues of the PPPs that I advocate is that, having their individualised pension pots and taking such responsibility for themselves, people would take a closer interest in their pension and would be better able to make their own judgments as to the sufficiency of their accumulated pension, and whether they needed to carry on working, at any rate part time, for longer. There will be the more need for people to extend their working lives now that they will have to repay university fees in the earlier years. Of course, if the Barker review of supply and demand for housing leads to policies that will reduce the British incubus of mortgage costs, that will make it easier for people to build better pensions. Meanwhile, since such a large proportion of personal wealth in Britain is tied up in bricks and mortar, we need properly designed and regulated home income schemes.
The Government should stop discouraging saving for personal pensions by relaxing their rule requiring commutation of personal pension funds for annuities by age 75. There is no such requirement in the US, I understand, on DC schemes. It is fair enough to require provision of an annuity sufficient to ensure independence of publicly funded benefits. Beyond that, people should be free to keep their personal pension funds until death, and indeed to bequeath them to their heirs provided that tax relief and inheritance tax are paid to the Exchequer from their estate.
Meanwhile, there are many useful things in the Bill—the introduction of the regulator, the extension of the transfer of undertakings principle in the private sector, the drive towards early transferability, those areas in which the Government are taking the axe to red tape, the encouragement to the provision of better information, and, as I anticipate, the change to the priority order in wind-ups. But we do face a savings crisis and an urgent need for pension reform in a variety of respects not encompassed in this particular Bill. We
need to look beyond the thickets of immediate pressures, decaying orthodoxies and vested interests. The Government have set up the Turner review, and no doubt Ministers are waiting for that report. I look forward to the Government unveiling their wider vision of a new pensions landscape and showing us how to arrive there.
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