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Mr. Webb: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hamilton, South (Mr. Tynan), who was one of the Labour Members who served in Committee. Those Labour Members were of uncharacteristically high quality—I shall leave it to them to work out whether that is a compliment or not. Certainly, they were knowledgeable about pensions and participated in the debate. They were not just lobby fodder, which is always a good thing, and they wrung one or two concessions
 
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out of the Government. For example, the hon. and learned Member for Redcar (Vera Baird) ensured that the report on women's pensions would be published next year. The hon. Member for Cardiff, West (Kevin Brennan) also worked hard.

It was good to be on a Committee in which all members participated fully, including my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Paul Holmes) and the hon. Member for East Carmarthen and Dinefwr (Adam Price). We were grateful to the hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) and his colleague, who ensured that the views of all the outside organisations were brought to the Committee's attention. We also appreciated the Ministers' contributions.

It was a little harsh to suggest that the Minister for Pensions lacks a sense of humour: he certainly needed one at times. I also thank him for engaging with the specific points that were raised. Although his answers were on occasion less than wholly convincing, at least he tried to address the points made, which made it feel a little more worth while going through 22 sittings knowing that every amendment one tabled would not be accepted. We are grateful to the Minister for Pensions for that, and we also appreciated the able assistance of the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who will now be known as the Minister for fraud and error.

We should also thank the officials. The original explanatory notes on a Bill are often paraphrases of the clauses and do not explain anything. However, the Government wrote this Bill as they went along, and the explanatory notes were often very useful. It may be the same people who write both sets of notes—it is a mystery to me—but the later explanatory notes gave more clue of what was going on than the original explanatory notes. I am not suggesting that the Government should write Bills as they go along, but we were grateful for those briefings.

With my usual prescience I described the Bill, on the eve of its publication, as half-baked, but I think I was guilty of exaggeration. It has grown substantially since Second Reading; it will get even thicker once the pages and pages of new clauses and amendments on Report have been added, and it ain't finished yet. We understand that their lordships will be given even more new clauses that the Government have not yet had the chance to write. In Committee, I likened that process to the moment when Wallace and Gromit were careering along in a train, furiously laying more and more track in front of them. Sometimes, the Bill felt like that. In the long run it does not make for good legislation. It would be nice to think that the Government have got away with it and have not unwittingly put gaping holes into the Bill at the last minute, but given the length of the Bill, there is a danger that we have allowed through some provisions that will have the unintended consequences of which the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson) spoke, and that would be regrettable.

There is much to welcome in the Bill. Mr. Alan Pickering called for a new kind of regulator—not a regulator who waits for people to complain, but one who goes out looking for trouble, like the Lone Ranger, and tries to do something about it, or who tries to prevent trouble in the first place. A proactive regulator is certainly a step in the right direction.
 
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The Bill has some slightly worrying parallels with the Pensions Act 1995. No doubt when the House was debating that Bill's Third Reading, some Members said, "It's great, we've created a new pensions regulator called OPRA which will be the answer to all our problems"; yet nine years later, here we are abolishing OPRA. At that time, no doubt Members said, "It's great, we've put in a minimum funding requirement to protect pension funds". Now, eight or nine years later, we are having to pick up the pieces of a measure that was not properly scrutinised. It did not set minimum funding at an adequate level, so people fell through the net. The 1995 Act introduced protection against fraud. The Bill introduces new protection. I hope that in another decade we shall not have to undo the problems caused by the Bill.

The extension of TUPE to cover pensions is welcome. Pensions should be part of the overall package. However, the political debate on the Bill has focused on the pension protection fund, and I shall touch on that later.

There was a missed opportunity in the Bill: the provisions on state pensions were very thin. Governments do not often legislate on pensions, and although the legislative book was open the Government missed the chance to do something substantive, especially on women's pensions. One of the groups of amendments that we did not reach was our set of proposals on women's pensions; I was especially disappointed that we could not discuss our provisions for women whose contribution record was less than 25 per cent. The hon. and learned Member for Redcar (Vera Baird) raised the issue of annuities, and much could be done about the state regime. There will be a report next year, which is all very well, but the problems on women's pensions were listed in the Green Paper and we are still no nearer tackling them. That is a missed opportunity.

Gregory Barker: The hon. Gentleman is right: the Bill is a missed opportunity in respect of the state pension. Can he confirm whether it is Liberal policy to restore the earnings link?

Mr. Webb: Unfortunately, we had no chance to debate that issue during our proceedings. However, as my colleague who speaks for older people has pointed out, we think it is so important that we are dedicating a major section of our autumn conference to the launch of our policy, so the hon. Gentleman can look forward to finding out the details at that stage.

The key point of the Bill is the pension protection fund. I shall not rehearse the concerns that we expressed earlier, but my noble Friends are particularly worried by the failure to introduce a risk-based premium early on. That could penalise well run schemes at the expense of the cowboys, and we are especially concerned about that feature of the scheme.

On Second Reading, the key omission was something for the 60,000 workers. I hope that the Secretary of State can give me a better answer than he did to an intervention on that point. When asked about that number, he said that, yes, 60,000 was the right sort of number. However, when he confirmed that figure, what did he think the question was? Sixty thousand people
 
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who did what? I presume that 60,000 is the number of people who have lost their pensions because underfunded pension schemes have closed or been wound up, but no one was then talking about excluding solvent employers.

I am pretty sure that the 60,000 figure, which comes from the pensions action group, has throughout included members of solvent schemes. If they are included in the 60,000 and the Government plan to exclude them under the Bill, how many of them will not receive compensation? If the pre-1997 wind-ups are taken into account, how many will be excluded? The danger is that the figure will be perhaps 10,000 or 15,000. We do not know the figure, but I hope that the ministerial report will tell us at the end of June how many of those 60,000 people will be excluded under the Government's provisions.

The Minister said yesterday that solvent employers should be held responsible for the underfunding of their schemes. However, solvent employers were allowed to close pension schemes under the old law that satisfied only the minimum funding requirement. The MFR did not provide full buy-out, so those people received less of a pension than they expected. As the hon. Member for Hamilton, South said, why is their moral claim to the pension that they expected any weaker because of the circumstances that led to the loss of their pension? It is not their fault that a solvent employer caused their pension to close, rather than it closing because their employer went out of business. Are we saying that it would be better for them if their employer had gone out of business than if it had remained solvent? According to the Government's logic, those people are somehow less deserving because their firm is still operating.

If the Government are right and they want to do something for those people and chase the solvent employers to recover the deficit in the schemes, that would be a satisfactory answer, but they may simply say, "Well, it's tough." The Government seem to be saying, "We sympathise, but a line must be drawn somewhere. It's tough." That would be wholly unacceptable.

Gregory Barker: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Webb: No. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, but I will not give way, because a lot of hon. Members want to contribute.

I hope that the Government will give further thought to the position of those people. Large numbers of employees of solvent employers are profoundly bitter that, after campaigning alongside their colleagues from insolvent employers, they will get nothing. I wonder whether the Minister will tell us in responding to the debate about the Government's strategy for those people, whose moral case is just as good.

The Bill inevitably misses an opportunity with state pensions. Clearly, we need action on women's pensions in particular, and the Bill says practically nothing about them.

We have supported the principle of the Bill throughout. We voted for the Bill on Second Reading—we did not decline to do so, unlike some—because we want people's pensions to be protected. That is why I
 
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will ask all my colleagues, who are scattered around the parliamentary estate, to come in and vote for the Bill on Third Reading when the moment comes. That is what we should do, but there are concerns about the way that the PPF will work, particularly in penalising good schemes if the risk-based premium is not dealt with early. We remain very concerned that the financial assistance scheme—albeit a small step in the right direction—will create new injustices, and it would be better to get it right first time during the consultation phase than to draw lines that create unfair and arbitrary distinctions.

4.23 pm

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