The
Committee consisted of the following
Members:
Chair:
Mr
David Amess
†
Blears,
Hazel (Salford and Eccles)
(Lab)
†
Coffey,
Ann (Stockport)
(Lab)
†
Eustice,
George (Camborne and Redruth)
(Con)
†
Greenwood,
Lilian (Nottingham South)
(Lab)
†
Griffiths,
Andrew (Burton)
(Con)
†
Johnson,
Joseph (Orpington)
(Con)
Kaufman,
Sir Gerald (Manchester, Gorton)
(Lab)
†
Laing,
Mrs Eleanor (Epping Forest)
(Con)
†
Lumley,
Karen (Redditch)
(Con)
†
McFadden,
Mr Pat (Wolverhampton South East)
(Lab)
Paisley,
Ian (North Antrim)
(DUP)
†
Reeves,
Rachel (Leeds West)
(Lab)
†
Selous,
Andrew (South West Bedfordshire)
(Con)
†
Smith,
Miss Chloe (Norwich North)
(Con)
†
Webb,
Steve (Minister of State, Department for Work and
Pensions)
†
Wharton,
James (Stockton South)
(Con)
†
Willott,
Jenny (Cardiff Central)
(LD)
Wood,
Mike (Batley and Spen)
(Lab)
Rhiannon Hollis, Committee
Clerk
† attended the
Committee
Second
Delegated Legislation
Committee
Monday 14
March
2011
[Mr
David Amess
in the
Chair]
Draft
Pension Protection Fund (Pension Compensation Cap) Order
2011
4.30
pm
The
Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve
Webb):
I beg to
move,
That
the Committee has considered the draft Pension Protection Fund (Pension
Compensation Cap) Order
2011.
The
Chair:
With this it will be convenient to consider the
draft Financial Assistance Scheme (Revaluation and Indexation
Amendments) Regulations 2011 and the draft Occupational Pension Schemes
(Levy Ceiling) Order
2011.
Steve
Webb:
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship
again, Mr Amess, albeit from the Government Benches this
time.
I
shall start with the two measures that relate to the Pension Protection
Fund: the levy ceiling order and the pension compensation cap order. As
the Committee knows, the compensation provided by the PPF is in part
funded by a levy. That is paid by schemes eligible for the protection
provided by the PPF. The level of the levy is the responsibility of the
PPF board, but the Pensions Act 2004 imposes a levy ceiling,
restricting the amount that the board may raise through the levy in any
year. As I am sure all members of the Committee know, the current
ceiling is
£871,183,684.
The
levy ceiling order increases the ceiling for the year beginning 1 April
2011. The way in which the increase is calculated is governed by the
2004 Act, which says that the increase must be in line with increases
in the general level of earnings in Great Britain. In this case, the
rate is the one published by the Office for National Statistics for the
year ending 31 July 2010. The order therefore increases the levy
ceiling by 2.4%, increasing it to £892,092,092 for the year
beginning 1 April 2011. For clarity, I remind the Committee that that
does not mean that the levy will be £892 million; rather, that
is the ceiling. The PPF has estimated that for the period concerned, it
will collect a pension protection levy of only about £600
million. The Committee will be pleased to know that the levy for the
coming year is about £100 million less than it was
the year
before.
I
shall move on to the PPF pension compensation cap order. The pension
compensation of anyone who enters the PPF before they reach their
normal pension age can be capped. The compensation cap for the year
beginning 1 April 2010 is £33,054.09. However, anyone under
normal pension age receives compensation at the 90% rate. That means
that their cap is currently 90% of that
figure—£29,748.68. The order increases that cap for the
year beginning 1 April 2011 in line with the general level of earnings
in Great Britain for the year ending 31 March 2010. The order therefore
increases
the cap by 0.5% to £33,219.36. The effect of that is to increase
the 90% cap for those under normal pension age to £29,897.42.
That new cap will apply to people who first become entitled to
compensation on or after 1 April
2011.
I
come now to the financial assistance scheme revaluation and indexation
amendments regulations. Many members of the Committee will be familiar
with the FAS and its complex genesis. The FAS exists to provide
financial help to members of qualifying pension schemes who face
significant losses because their scheme is wound up underfunded.
Assistance is also payable to the survivor of a pension scheme member
and to certain surviving dependants. Unlike the PPF, which is the
subject of the other two draft measures, the FAS is mainly funded by
the taxpayer. However, both mechanisms are managed by the PPF
board.
To
update the Committee, as of 31 January there were 1,001 FAS-qualifying
schemes and approximately 16,000 people receiving FAS payments. Many
more members of those schemes will receive help as they enter
retirement in the coming years. So far, the FAS has paid out
approximately £126 million in assistance. In 2009-10 alone, it
paid out a total of nearly £34 million. We estimate
that that will increase to some £44 million this
year.
As
hon. Members will be aware, the current incarnation of the FAS is based
on the commitment to extend the scheme announced in December 2007. That
commitment meant that the FAS would help more members and give them
more money. The extension provided qualifying members with 90% of their
accrued pension at the date of commencement of winding up, revalued to
their retirement date, subject to a cap. It also committed the FAS to
provide some protection against price inflation once assistance came
into payment through the payment of indexation on rights accrued after
1997, although the announcement did not explicitly say what measure of
inflation would be
used.
The
number of schemes that have been helped has steadily increased since
the December 2007 announcement. In March 2008, 710 schemes qualified
for help. As I advised the Committee, there has been an increase in
notifications to the scheme manager, so a total of 1,001 schemes have
successfully qualified for assistance.
The changes
being made to the FAS revaluation indexation rules are the consequence
of a wider decision. The Chancellor announced in June last year that
the Government intended to use the consumer prices index to uprate
benefits, tax credits and public service pensions. In July of that
year, I announced that the CPI would be used also in determining
increases for all occupational pensions and payments by the PPF and the
FAS. The FAS will continue to provide an appropriate level of help to
members who have lost out on some of their pensions, including
protection against consumer price inflation. It will continue to be
broadly in line with the help provided by the PPF.
The House has
discussed at length the use of the RPI and CPI. I shall touch on those
briefly, but I shall not rehearse our debates on the uprating orders.
Our decision to use a different inflation measure from the RPI was
based on our belief that a better measure was available. First, the CPI
takes account of consumers trading down to cheaper goods when prices
rise; it reflects the basic budgeting changes that people make, but the
RPI
does not. Secondly, it more accurately reflects the costs faced by the
majority of pensioners by excluding mortgage interest payments.
Thirdly, it is the headline measure of inflation in Great Britain,
forming the target for the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy
Committee, and thereby reflects the “general level of
prices”.
I do not
contend that the CPI is a good index or that the RPI is a bad one.
However, regardless of whether the RPI would result in higher or lower
increases, I believe that the CPI is a more appropriate measure of
price inflation. Increases in line with the growth of the CPI will
therefore protect the value of members’ assistance.
I turn to
some points of detail. The regulations change the inflation measure
specified in the FAS regulations from the RPI to the general level of
prices. As a result, accrued pensions will be revalued by the RPI for
the period before 31 March this year, and by reference to the CPI after
that date, subject to the 5% cap. On indexation, rights
accrued after 1997 and applied on 1 January 2012 can be based on
increases in the CPI subject to the current cap of 2.5%. I note in
parenthesis that as CPI and the RPI are both above 2.5%, it is likely
to make no difference to the January 2012 indexation. The CPI can be
used also for the annual increase to the FAS cap that will be applied
in April.
Committee
members may have noted that the measures do not mention the CPI. They
refer to the general level of prices. That is because there are a
number of different indices for measuring inflation, and we do not want
to have to amend the orders again if, for example, the CPI changes its
name or if a more appropriate indexation is found. We have adopted the
more general term, which is consistent with that used in occupational
pensions legislation. However, as I announced last year, we intend to
use the CPI. If in future we want to use a different inflation measure,
we will of course consult on our proposals.
The measures
will ensure that the FAS payments continue to be protected against
inflation in a way that is reasonable and appropriate. In my view, they
are compatible with the European convention on human rights. I commend
them to the Committee.
4.38
pm
Rachel
Reeves (Leeds West) (Lab):
I thank the Minister for the
details he has given the Committee. I believe this is the last time
that questions about the Pension Protection Fund will be debated in
Committee, so I want to put on the record a few things about it. The
Minister will know that some 55,000 people have benefited from the PPF,
that 212 schemes are currently part of it and that
£236 million has been paid in compensation to scheme
members. Scheme members range in age from four to 105, and I know that
the PPF makes a substantial difference to people’s lives.
Schemes include Woolworths, MG Rover, Nortel, and Turner and Newall.
The people in those schemes would all have had much lower pensions were
it not for the PPF.
I welcome the
creation of the PPF and the Government’s continuing commitment
to it. Without it, scheme members would have had very little if any of
the pensions that they were expecting on retirement, to which they had
contributed for much of their working lives. It is a double whammy for
them to lose their job and then their pension.
I have a
couple of specific questions for the Minister. The PPF is a great
success, with 10 schemes having just transferred into it and some 409
schemes and 200,000 members now in the assessment stage. What lessons
can we learn about the assessment stage and how long it takes for a
scheme to come into the PPF? Last month, the PPF announced that there
would be a new levy framework for 2012-13. Does the Minister think that
the ceiling we are debating today will make a material difference to
the pension that people receive from the
PPF?
Will
the Minister confirm how many people are affected by the cap? The PPF
told me that it is in the order of 60, but last week in the other place
Lord Freud said that the figure was closer to 90. More generally, how
much worse off will recipients be on average if the clauses in the
Pensions Bill go ahead with the shift from RPI to CPI inflation? We
have seen estimates of a 15% reduction in occupational
pensions. Is that replicated in the PPF as
well?
Moving
on to the financial assistance scheme, this measure is one of several
signalling that millions of pensioners will see the value of their
pensions fall every year because of the shift from RPI to CPI. The
Minister said that we will not rehearse the debates we had in the
Chamber on this issue, but let me just make a few points for the
record. Making a permanent change from RPI to CPI, the impact of which
will be felt long after the deficit is gone, is an ideologically driven
move that the Opposition do not support. If this were a time-limited
change ensuring that benefits will not fall behind earnings over the
next few years, we would, as the Minister knows, consider it. We agree
that we need to reduce the deficit, but why are we ensuring through
these changes that those in receipt of a pension under the financial
assistance scheme carry on bearing the cost of deficit reduction long
after the deficit is gone?
As the
Minister knows, RPI is between 0.5 and 0.7 percentage points
higher on average than the CPI, so in any given year pensions linked to
CPI will give people less income. The CPI figure for the year to
September 2010 is 3.1%; the equivalent for RPI is 4.6%—a
difference of 1.5 percentage points and a big difference for pensioners
who rely on the state pension or the financial scheme.
The
Department for Work and Pensions estimates an £83 billion fall
in the value of occupational pensions over the next 15 years as a
result of the shift from RPI to CPI. For the 2 million members of
defined-benefit schemes, this is broadly the same as a pay cut
of between £2,250 and £2,500 a year. What
would be the equivalent figure for those members benefiting from the
FAS? I hope the Minister can answer that
today.
Estimates
of the long-term losses provide clear evidence that long after the
deficit has gone, pensioners will be worse off. The Government are
already hitting pensioners with the increase in VAT, and the Pensions
Bill means that women in their late-50s approaching retirement will
have to wait for up to an extra two years until they get their state
pension, so that is another hit to
pensioners.
On
accrued rights, during the consultation FAS members felt that the
switch to CPI undermined commitments made by the previous Labour
Government regarding the level of assistance the FAS would pay. Some
FAS members believe they have a legitimate expectation of
receiving RPI-based increases from the FAS, as the RPI was specified in
legislation. The Minister himself said before the
election:
“We
are very clear that all accrued rights should be honoured: a pension
promise made should be a pension promise kept. Therefore we would not
make any changes to pension rights that have already been built
up.”
Does he feel that
accrued rights are being protected with these changes? I am not
convinced that CPI is a more appropriate measure than RPI, as the
Minister seems to think. For pensioners and low-income families, the
average inflation rate is more than RPI and CPI, because of the
additional money that low-income families and pensioners spend on food
and fuel. The Royal Statistical Society
says:
“While
the consumer price index (CPI) is acceptable for macroeconomic purposes
and for international comparisons within the EU we do not believe its
coverage is generally appropriate for inflation compensation
purposes.”
Age
UK says
that
“the
Government should retain the Retail Price Index as the main measure to
be used where pensions and state benefits are linked to price
increases. We do not agree that the Consumer Price Index is a more
appropriate measure of pensioners’ costs than the RPI and we are
concerned that over time it will reduce the income levels of many older
people.”
Baroness
Greengross, president of the Pensions Policy Institute, has
said:
“According
to Age UK’s silver retail prices index, the impact of inflation
on those in later life is far greater than estimated by official
measures. For example, since the beginning of 2008, those aged over 55
have experienced price rises at almost two percentage points above that
suggested by headline RPI figures, rising to four percentage points for
those over 75.”—[Official Report, House of Lords,
15 February 2011; Vol. 725, c.
598.]
If the
Minister wants a measure of inflation that reflects the experience of
pensioners, does he really believe that CPI is the closest thing we
have to
that?
I
have some specific questions. What will be the cost of the provisions
for FAS members? What will be the difference in overall incomes due to
the shift from RPI to CPI? During the consultation, one member
expressed
concern
“that
if the switch to the CPI delivers lower increases over time it might
generate a cost to Government by increasing the take up of means-tested
benefits”.
What
assessment has the Minister made of that? Finally, the impact on women
is likely to be greater than that on men because women live longer, so
what equality impact assessment has he made of
that?
4.46
pm
Steve
Webb:
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her support for
the work of the Pension Protection Fund. She was right to place on the
record what an important initiative it is. It was introduced under the
auspices of the Pensions Act 2004, which I remember spending many happy
hours scrutinising. It rightly had all-party support and the previous
Administration deserve credit for introducing
it.
The
hon. Lady asked about the process known as the assessment period.
Lessons are being learnt continually about that. One of the problems
about the assessment period is that schemes often have dodgy records. A
well
run scheme with good records is a lot quicker to process. Problems occur
when a scheme is underfunded, the company goes to the wall and the
scheme records are not that great. It then takes a long time to track
down all the members and their details, get them reconciled with the
national insurance computer and complete all the other things and legal
processes that have to be done. Indeed, some of the scheme rules are
themselves unclear, so working out what people are entitled to and
comparing it with the PPF levels of compensation is an involved
process, which I think all members of the Committee would like to see
speeded
up.
I
am pleased to say that the PPF is making progress on that. The time
taken to wind up schemes is being improved and the pension regulator is
being proactive on it. The regulator is working hard to get trustees to
see the importance of good record keeping. Obviously, we do not have a
crystal ball to foretell which future schemes will come under the
PPF’s ambit, so the regulator is working proactively to try to
make sure that schemes have good records so that the assessment
process, should it happen, can take place as swiftly as possible. There
is always room for progress on the issue, but I believe that progress
is being
made.
The
hon. Lady asked whether the levy ceiling contained in the regulations
will have an impact on the levy’s new structure, particularly
the role of the risk-based levy. The levy ceiling simply gives what
they call in the trade a quantum—a maximum amount. In practice,
as I have mentioned, the proposed levy for next year is more than
£0.25 billion below the levy ceiling, so we do not anticipate
that the level of the ceiling will have any impact on the proposed new
structure of the
levy.
The
hon. Lady asked for clarification on how many people were caught by the
cap. It has been a few days since my noble Friend Lord Freud gave an
answer in the other place, but now, hot off the press, we have an even
more up-to-date response. As of 28 February 2011, 95 scheme
members who were receiving compensation were affected by the
cap.
Jenny
Willott (Cardiff Central) (LD):
Will the Minister clarify
whether there is a difference between the cap amount that applies to
those under the financial assistance scheme and that which applies to
those covered by the PPF fund? He has kindly given clear figures for
the PPF, but not for the FAS. Will he also clarify whether the cap
remains the same for those FAS members who already receive their
pensions and whose payments are up to the cap, and for those who will
receive pension payments for the first time this year but who are
already at the cap? Will both groups receive the same
amount?
Steve
Webb:
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. As she says, there
are differences between the cap regimes for the PPF and the FAS, one of
which is the indexation process. The FAS is, essentially, a
backward-looking scheme, so it looks at schemes in which the insolvency
event took place before 2004. If I recall correctly, the 2004 Act took
the decision that the cap would be indexed on a prices basis. The PPF
cap, on the other hand, is earnings indexed, because the relevant
schemes have been live since the PPF was set up. The levy is coming in
on an ongoing basis, so the indexation rules are different. I will
return in a moment to the detailed points that my hon. Friend has
raised regarding new entrants to the scheme.
Turning
to the FAS questions that the hon. Member for Leeds West has raised,
she said—as did the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen
Timms) during our debate in the Chamber on 17 February—that the
move to CPI is ideological. As I said in response, I have never heard
the use of the geometric mean described as ideological before.
Neither the RPI nor the CPI is perfect, but we have to judge which is
the better fit. I recall vividly receiving many angry letters after
April 2010 asking why people’s state earnings-related pension
scheme pensions and their public sector pensions had been frozen in
April 2010, and the answer was that the RPI was negative in the year to
September 2009. I have yet to meet a pensioner who thinks that their
inflation rate was negative in the year to September
2009.
Mr
Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab):
I am
interested in the Minister’s justification for this. Is he
really saying that it has nothing to do with saving
money?
Steve
Webb:
Clearly, all these decisions are taken in the
context of the fiscal position. Rather than picking a number out of
thin air and saying that we can save some money, however, we have a
statutory duty to link the real value of these thresholds and benefits
to the general increase in prices. We have looked, in the context of
the current fiscal position, at the most appropriate measure. The
example that I have given regarding September 2009 was fresh in our
minds in the summer of 2010 when that decision was
taken.
Rachel
Reeves:
Will the Minister confirm how much the RPI
increases differed from the CPI, on average, per
year?
Steve
Webb:
The central assumption, if I remember correctly, is
a 0.87 percentage point difference on average, although that varies a
lot from year to year. That is significant. In four or five of the past
20 years, CPI has been bigger in the year to September, which is the
one that is used for indexation, and therefore the profile of
indexation better fits pensioner inflation experiences. Clearly,
everyone would rather have a big increase than a small one, but we also
want an increase that matches when people experience the
inflation.
The point
about the year to September 2009 is that the RPI was negative not
because pensioners had not experienced inflation, but because mortgage
rates had fallen rapidly. I do not see the connection between pensioner
price inflation, for which we are supposed to be compensating, and big
falls in mortgage rates. Indeed, for pensioners, big falls in mortgage
rates tend to go hand in hand with big falls in savings rates, and they
are bad news. Just at the point that pensioners are suffering a loss in
savings income we hit them with a zero inflation rise, which does not
seem right to me.
The hon.
Member for Leeds West has asked about the impact of the difference on
the financial assistance scheme. We estimate that over the lifetime of
the FAS it will be about 10% on the liabilities; I believe that my
noble Friend Lord Freud has given that figure in the other place. The
impact on each individual will be different, because it has an impact
on indexation and on revaluation, and therefore the exact impact on
every individual depends on how old they are. We expect the long-term
Exchequer effect to be about 10%.
The
hon. Lady has asked about accrued rights, and I take that very
seriously. People accrued rights under the FAS, and she will have
noticed that in my introductory remarks I said that all the revaluation
up to March of this year stands. We are not revisiting past
revaluations and saying that we have decided that inflation was
different for history; we are saying that the best measure of inflation
for the future is CPI. I stress that there is nothing retrospective
about this. Every revaluation to date and every indexation to date of
pensions in payment stands, but we have a duty to look at the general
increase in price levels as most appropriately measured, especially
under these regulations.
Rachel
Reeves:
Will the Minister confirm that that is the
indexation of previously accrued pensions?
Steve
Webb:
The sequence of events is that if people leave the
scheme or the insolvency event takes place before pension age, it is
revalued until the point when it is drawn and subsequently indexed in
payment. We are not touching any of the valuations that have taken
place up to the present day. We are changing the way in which future
revaluations happen, which will be in line with the best measure of
inflation in our judgment. That has always been the position. Clearly,
a question exists about FAS, because the FAS legislation specified RPI.
Future Parliaments have to look at legislation and decide whether that
was the right way to do it, which is what these regulations are
about.
Jenny
Willott:
Could the Minister say whether or not the
Government have considered looking at the indexation rights for those
in the financial assistance scheme who were in a pension scheme that
allowed for indexation prior to 1997? Although the FAS specifically
says that there can only be indexation post-1997, there are a number of
schemes in FAS where the rights of the members include indexation
rights prior to 1997. Have the Government considered that
issue?
Steve
Webb:
No, we have not. The principle behind the FAS
was never to exactly replicate the specific provisions of each
individual scheme. It took the accrued rights at the point of the
insolvency event and applied FAS rules thereafter. One of the reasons
for that was the issue of diversity and complexity. One of the problems
that we have already found is that the complexity and diversity of
schemes slows the whole process down. I know that my hon. Friend has
worked closely with the Allied Steel and Wire workers and other people
in her Cardiff, Central constituency. However, one thing we found was
that people wanted things to move on quickly. When people have lost
their job and lost their pension, as the hon. Member for Leeds West
said, they want us to get on with things. There are problems with FAS
using scheme-specific pre-1997 accruals and so on, which were not
statutory—that is the key point here. One of the problems is
that every scheme will be different and it will just be very
complicated to deal with them all differently. FAS is a safety-net
scheme. So the judgment was taken that FAS would not provide pre-1997
indexation, because that was not a statutory requirement from
schemes.
Further to my
hon. Friend’s question about FAS caps, the FAS cap itself is not
actually set in annual orders. That was why I did not specifically
mention it
today. However, the caps apply when payments come into force, once only.
It is a one-off process. When the payment comes into force, the cap is
applied at that point. I hope that that answer is helpful to my hon.
Friend.
Jenny
Willott:
Is the Minister saying then that the cap is then
frozen at that point for the duration of that pension in
payment?
Steve
Webb:
No. I am saying that the cap that prevails at that
time is applied once, and then it is subject to indexation in respect
of post-1997 service only. So there is a cap. It bites once, according
to whatever it happens to be at that point in time, and it is then
indexed thereafter. That is the way that the process works.
The hon.
Member for Leeds West raised the issue of pensioner inflation. She
quoted the Age UK silver retail prices report and she quoted figures
for the period from 2008 to 2010. I have looked at that report and she
did not quote figures for the period from 2004 to 2008. Age UK draws a
silver graph and another graph, and the two are virtually
indistinguishable over that four-year period. I fully accept that, over
a two-year period, there will be times when pensioner inflation is
higher, and over other two-year periods there will be times when
pensioner inflation is lower. I asked for statistics over a long
run—over a 20-year period—and there is no evidence that
in the long run pensioner inflation is higher on average.
If one thinks
about it, there is no self-evident reason why the things that
pensioners buy should have little ticking inflation time bombs inside
them. It would be strange if that were the case. The hon. Lady is an
economist. One could write a textbook on the economic implications of
the presumption that pensioners’ goods are more
inflationary.
My point is
that one could pick any two-year period to find examples to show
pensioner inflation that is different to the average. There are bound
to be examples. However, over the long run I do not think that there is
any factual basis for the hon. Lady’s
claim.
Rachel
Reeves:
Thinking about it for two seconds, one might think
that technological sectors, such as electronics, have lower levels of
inflation and one would not expect that pensioners would spend such a
high proportion of their income on the goods that those sectors produce
as younger people would. So there might be reasons why there is higher
pensioner inflation. Would the Minister concede
that?
Steve
Webb:
There might be, although presumably one could then
argue, “Pensioners tend to spend more of their time at home, so
they’ll want a better telly and so they’ll spend more
money”. One could speculate on all these things. My point is
that the evidence—the factual evidence collected over 20
years—does not substantiate that claim. The hon. Lady could pick
a random two-year period to show something, but I could pick a two-year
period where the opposite would be
true.
Finally,
the hon. Lady asked about the impact on means-tested benefits. We are
over-indexing the pension credit, so we are linking the pension credit
to earnings and earnings rise faster than prices. Clearly, therefore,
any price-indexed benefit over time might mean at the margins that
there will be slightly more expenditure on means-tested benefits. The
impact will be relatively modest. We have not made estimates of the
impact, but because we are earnings-indexing the pension credit it
stands to reason that anything—whether it is CPI-linked or
RPI-linked—will have a slight tendency, as people get older, to
be drawn within the scope of means-tested benefits.
Drawing those
threads together, we are proud to confirm our support for the ongoing
work of the pension protection fund. We value the work of the board and
the security that that gives to occupational pensioners. We also stand
by our commitment to the financial assistance scheme—more than
1,000 schemes, as the hon. Lady said, for people from age four to 104
to receive pensions that they might not otherwise have got. We assure
campaigners that we intend to stick to the scheme in the
future.
Question
put and agreed
to.
Resolved
,
That the
Committee has considered the draft Pension Protection Fund (Pension
Compensation Cap) Order 2011.
DRAFT Financial
Assistance Scheme (Revaluation and Indexation Amendments) Regulations
2011
Resolved,
That the
Committee has considered the draft Financial Assistance Scheme
(Revaluation and Indexation Amendments) Regulations
2011.—(Steve
Webb.)
DRAFT
Occupational Pension Schemes (Levy Ceiling) Order
2011
Resolved
,
That the
Committee has considered the draft Occupational Pension Schemes (Levy
Ceiling) Order 2011.—(Steve
Webb.)
5.1
pm
Committee
rose.
