| Welfare Reform and Pensions Bill
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Mr. Quentin Davies: I have been listening to my hon. Friend with great interest. Has he noticed, as many of us have, the extraordinary pang of embarrassment and the frisson of jealousy that come over the faces of DSS Ministers whenever the acronym LISA is mentioned? They clearly wish that it had never been mentioned; they have not mentioned it in their Bill, they do not mention it in their speeches and they hope that the whole thing will go away. The Chairman: Order. Again, that is right outside the sittings motion. I must ask hon. Members to stay within it. Mr. Flight: Had the full time for consultation been allowed, some important comments and proposals from the Committee would have emerged as we went through the pensions section. The Government had 20 months to prepare their Green Paper, which was delayed on several occasions. Clearly, it has stirred up a great deal of thought among all concerned. When we address the pension clauses and, in particular, the stakeholder clauses, will the Minister consider what I have said and the need for substantial amendment of the Bill to achieve a simple, low-cost pension for the self-employed? Mr. Brazier: In considering the sittings motion, I thought that it might be interesting to see what the Government's explanatory notes say. Paragraph 3 of the introduction states:
In other words, we have before us, as my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford so cogently put it, three Bills welded together, each of which will require as much consideration as a whole Bill normally would. You rightly restrained me earlier, Mr. Malins, from straying to the Family Law Act 1996. However, I want to illustrate why, besides the welfare and pensions, which the explanatory notes show are two separate areas, pension splitting is a separate area, which will need a huge amount of consideration on its own. We shall be considering the whole nature of the divorce process, which is far removed from the two other main sections of the Bill. The previous Government said that it was extremely complicated and difficult, and should be treated separately from their main measures on divorce. To tack it on to a Bill dealing with welfare and other more general pension matters presents a huge challenge to this Committee in the coming weeks. As we shall be still hard at it in the spillover after the summer recess, the Ministers will have the opportunity for further consultation on that subject, which mercifully comes towards the end of the Bill. That will help to make up for the premature curtailing of the consultation on earlier provisions. One of the duties of Standing Committee members is to deal with the correspondence that comes to them when they are considering a Bill. Given the huge amount of ground covered by the Bill and the fact that the consultation period was curtailed, we will need a great deal of time to fill in the gaps from that consultation. I want to clarify the record, as the Minister went a little wide in his opening remarks. He said that a number of Conservative Members in the Committee had strongly attacked the introduction by the previous Government of means-testing. That is true, although had he been his normal charitable self, he would have mentioned that the measures were introduced in 1988, when most of us had only just arrived in the House of Commons [Hon. Members: "Oh, that's all right then." ] I hope that Back-Bench Members of this Standing Committee, all of whom have at least a year's more experience in the House than I had in 1988, will show some independence of spirit. Mr. Leigh: I doubt it. Mr. Brazier: We are hoping. Conservative Members have published many papers attacking means-testing. I have published four that have been reviewed in the broadsheet press. As we consider the provision, week after week, Labour Members must be clear that the bulk of the Bill takes the welfare state several steps further down the road that we began to go down in 1988.. many of their hon. Friends rightly predicted at the time, as did a number of Conservative colleagues, including Sir Brandon Rhys Williams, who is sadly no longer with us, that it would have consequences for increasing dependency. As we look hard over the next few weeks at pension and welfare provisions, it will be very much part of my duty to explain in detail why they will increase dependency and reduce thrift. For that reason, this will have to be a very long Standing Committee. Mr. Leigh: I want to make one point that is directly relevant to the sittings motion. I do not intend to deal with the substance or merits of the Bill. Some members of the Committee, like members of Select Committees, have devoted a considerable portion of their life to considering pension splitting on divorce, and we produced a well-received and detailed report. One of my many interests in the Bill is to ensure that we have adequate and full debate on pension splitting on divorce, which is an immensely complicated procedure. I have my own criticisms of it, which I do not need to go into now, but the provision could affect many millions of people in the next 50 years. The courts have traditionally found it difficult to intervene and we are opening up new ground. Without trying to be alarmist, I have always felt that this provision was a similar issue to the Child Support Agency, although not as disastrous. Therefore, I want to ensure that we have a full debate. There are some controversial aspects early in the Bill, which, in view of what hon. Members have said, we shall have to debate at considerable length. I have one concern and I hope that the Minister can give me a commitment now, because pensions splitting on divorce is so important and is not a party political issue. I am fearful that at some stage the Government may say, "We have debated this for so many hours. We shall now move a guillotine and we shall do so before we reach pension splitting on divorce." From previous experience I know that one moves suddenly into a guillotine timetable, where debate is severely curtailed. We could rightly spend a considerable amount of time I make no complaint about it on the earlier aspects of the Bill, which are politically contentious, and then have a hugely curtailed debate on pension splitting on divorce, which would not accord it the importance that it merits. Therefore, I hope that the Government will give a commitment that, whatever happens, the House will not fail in its duty to allow the Committee to devote the right amount of time to the debates on pension splitting on divorce. Mr. Timms: I want to respond briefly to some of the points that have been raised in this interesting debate. The hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford said at the start of his speech that he thought that we should have three sittings motion debates. I think that the length of his speech was roughly equivalent to five and, although I will not replicate that, I make no apology for the fact that this is a wide-ranging, radical and far-reaching Bill. The Government are ambitious. We want to change the way in which the welfare system works by modernising and reforming it. The Bill is an important step in the right direction. I was grateful for the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley. She spoke of her enthusiasm for sitting on the Committee and we look forward with enthusiasm to her contributions to our deliberations. I was especially grateful to her for eliciting from the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford the withdrawal of his misleading remark about children. The Bill contains important improvements for the position of children. The well-being of children is a central concern of the Government. I was also grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Mr. Levitt) for his intervention, which caused a good deal of confusion among Opposition Members.
12.15 pmI want to respond to one point that is particularly relevant to the motion. The hon. Members for Grantham and Stamford and for Arundel and South Downs suggested that there had been inadequate consultation. There is some misunderstanding about the background and it is important that I set the record straight. There was thorough consultation on the framework for stakeholder pensions. Opposition Members should know that a consultation paper on stakeholder pensions was issued in November 1997. It received more than 200 detailed responses, which were taken into account when we developed the Green Paper proposals and the framework that is in the Bill. There have also been extensive discussions with representatives of the pensions industry. Full consultation has taken place on the measures before us. Beyond the framework in the Bill there will be as there always is with pensions legislation a raft of regulations. The consultation period is continuing to help to develop those. The hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford mentioned the National Association of Pension Funds. I met its chairman for the second time last week. I can reassure the hon. Gentleman that there are no complaints from the NAPF or any other part of the industry about the haste with which the process is proceeding. The commitment in the Queen's Speech to legislate on stakeholder pensions is honoured in the Bill. Hon. Members on the Committee and elsewhere will want to move swiftly to improve the woefully inadequate availability of funded pensions. There are many people for whom no appropriate funded pension is available. It is time for that to change. We are moving quickly, on the basis of full and thorough consultation, to put that right.
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| ©Parliamentary copyright 1999 | Prepared 2 March 1999 |
