Pension Schemes Bill — House of Lords, 2015-01-12
Topic: Labor
Richard Balfe (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I welcome the opportunity of being able to speak to this proposed extra clause at the end of the Bill. I will say straightaway that it is motivated by friends in BALPA, the union for pilots, but it also affects a number of other higher-paid workers who are caught by what many of us would regard as an anomaly in pensions legislation The aim of the amendment is to ask for a review of the part of the Pensions Act that covers the limitation on funds that can be paid out to people whose pensions go into the Pension Protection Fund. In particular, I refer to pilots who used to work for Monarch Airlines—which has gone into the Pension Protection Fund—many of them with many years of service, but because of the cap that was put on payments out, they are limited as to the amount of pension which they can now draw. That cap was put into place for very good reason: to stop moral hazard; to stop directors who were members of their company pension fund abusing the fund knowing that they could basically transfer their liabilities for their own pensions to the Pension Protection Fund. However, the people who I am speaking about, such as the pilots of Monarch Airlines, are inadvertently caught. They had no say whatever in the way in which the company was run. They were workers for the company; they were higher-paid workers and were paid the sort of wages which you only get in the other House down the corridor—of course, if the House of Commons ever went into the Pension Protection Fund, many MPs’ pensions would be limited as well, but no one would say that they are the directors of a company. They are the MPs of the people and look after many things, but they would be caught So the amendment is a measure to deal mainly with higher-paid workers, but workers who have none the less put in. We are very fond in this country of bashing anyone who makes anything that exceeds the higher-rate tax threshold, but there are many people who go to university, who work hard in our economy and who exceed the higher-rate tax threshold—they earn more than £40,000 or sometimes even more than that, and they do earn it. I have never been a subscriber to the view that we have to pay megabucks to everybody, but I have always been a subscriber to the view that a decently trained professional worker who is putting their efforts into the benefit of the country deserves a decent wage. These pilots are highly skilled people and deserve a decent wage, as do people at the Atomic Energy Authority and British Midland Airways who are caught. In this particular instance, of some 67 pilots, around 13 will lose more than half the pension that they have paid for. Part of the weakness in the Pension Protection Fund is that your levy is not based on how many workers are covered; it is based on the liabilities of your fund. If someone earns too much to get the full pension, you are still paying, as I understand it, a levy into the pension fund which is commensurate with the liabilities of the fund, not of the individuals I am asking the Minister to look at the PPF cap and how it works. We are proposing two ways of dealing with it: either reviewing the cap on the basis of years of service over 20 years, as the current planned change would do little to help many of those in the pension scheme who are affected by the cap; or reducing the service-related or age-related underpin into the PPF. We are basically looking for a way of relieving those workers. It would be a comparatively cheap operation, largely because many people who earn a lot of money are in the PPF. It is estimated that the measure would cost something in the order of £12 million in all over all the years that the extra pensions would have to be paid, so it is not a huge amount of money I am therefore asking the Minister to have a look at this matter. Clearly, the categories of people that I am speaking about are not the decision-makers and they should not be caught by moral hazard. They are well worthy of a review of the contributions that they have made and the way in which the PPF works. I have not made enough speeches in this House to know whether it is conventional to thank my colleagues opposite, the noble Lords, Lord Monks and Lord McKenzie, for their help in meeting the union that I have mentioned. I think that we are talking on a cross-party basis in asking for this matter to be seriously looked at by the Government. I beg to move.