Pensions Dashboards (Prohibition of Indemnification) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-15
Topic: Labor
Guy Thomas Opperman (Conservative, Centre-right): It matters tremendously to Watford, and I will tell my hon. Friend why: in Watford, 45,000 constituents are benefiting from a workplace pension under automatic enrolment. That is a transformational thing that was genuinely not there barely 10 years ago We all support the pensions industry, but it has basically been existing in the 19th century. With the pensions dashboard, we have jumped over the entire 20th century and into the 21st by bringing things online. The pensions dashboard will take pensions—all 40,000 schemes up and down the country in the private and public sector and the state pension—and make them all accessible via iPads, mobile phones and computers. That is transformational I am old enough to have met my bank manager—a person whom I used to go and see and have a conversation with. That never happens any more, yet, with the banking and savings apps that many of us now have, the way we engage with our bank is transformational compared with days gone by. We hope that people will have a pensions app so that, as they take the bus or train to work, they can look at their bank account, their savings account and their pensions at the same time and move money between them This process started under the Pension Schemes Act 2021, which genuinely transformed the digital divide. The 20-year campaign of my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell), both outside and inside Parliament, is seeing the fruits of his labours. This will make our lives easier, putting it bluntly, because we will have accessible information on an ongoing basis. It will make things simpler by enabling us to make decisions as consumers in a way we never have before, and it will make things better by providing a greater understanding of how to control our money. Surely that is something for which we all strive The Government support this Bill, and it is an honour to be here on a day when the House has taken forward four Bills, including the Shark Fins Bill, the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Bill and the Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Bill, which is particularly relevant to my good self as I have suffered loss. I listened to those debates with great interest, and I totally support the Bills This Bill is of great importance as we seek to make pensions safer, better and greener. As the hon. Member for Cheadle indicated, with record numbers of people saving for retirement it is more important than ever that people understand their pensions information and prepare for financial security in later life. Dashboards will unquestionably make people do that The Department for Work and Pensions published a consultation on the draft pensions dashboard regulations earlier this year, and only yesterday we published the response to that consultation, setting out in detail that we are fully committed to driving forward pensions dashboards and making them happen at the earliest opportunity The Bill will increase protections for pension savers by prohibiting trustees and managers of occupational and personal pension schemes from being reimbursed out of scheme assets in respect of penalties imposed on them by any future dashboard regulations. The Bill will achieve this by amending section 256 of the Pensions Act 2004, under which, if a trustee or manager were to be reimbursed and knew or had reasonable grounds to believe that they had been so reimbursed, they would be guilty of a criminal offence unless they had taken all reasonable steps to prevent it. For those found guilty, the provisions allow for a maximum sentence of up to two years in prison or a fine, or both Additionally, were any amount to be paid out of a scheme’s assets in such a way, the Pensions Regulator would have the power to issue civil penalties to any trustee or manager who failed to take all reasonable steps to secure compliance. Section 256 of the 2004 Act already prohibits reimbursement of penalties issued under a number of other pieces of pensions legislation, including automatic enrolment. We therefore consider the proposed amendment to that Act to be a very logical and welcome change My hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Darren Henry) is a fantastic champion for his constituency, for which I thank him. He has spoken repeatedly in this House of the importance of pensions to his constituents, and I can tell him that 29,000 of his constituents have been automatically enrolled into a workplace pension. This is of massive importance to his constituents My hon. Friend raised two points that I will briefly address. First, we are talking about a significant number of pensions, because the average person will have several pots as they continue to work. They might have a job at the age of 18, 21, 24 or 26 before moving to another job. The dashboard starts out as a tracing service, as we have discussed. We already have the Pension Tracing Service, which allows people to seek and identify any lost pensions, but the dashboard will take that so much further. Individuals will be able to access in a safe way all their pensions, make decisions on consolidation and consider their options and possible outcomes in a way that they never could before. This is proper, modern, Conservative, consumer-focused politics that is genuinely transformational for the British people. I am so pleased that my hon. Friend supports that. It is important for his constituents that we support them, not just with workplace pensions As I outlined earlier, the support through the state pension has doubled effectively over the past 12 years. The Government are also bringing forward other support, whether it is the specific cost of living support that landed in a million of our constituents’ accounts—£326, and there will be £324 later this year—or whether it is the extra £300 in winter fuel payments for all our pensioner constituents, or the £400 that will go to households that are registered as recipients of energy, along with the energy support grant that will land in October and November. All those packages will be there to support constituents as they cope with the difficulties that have been caused fundamentally by the war in Ukraine and the energy war that we are effectively engaged in with Putin.