Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)

My Lords, I will speak to my amendment in this first group. Needless to say, I agree with everything my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe said from the Front Bench. This Bill is a most unfortunate Bill. It clearly has come about because the Chancellor has said to her officials, “I need £5 billion, can you find it now?”, and out of the bottom drawer has come a Bill which has been rejected by so many others. I do not think it was in the manifesto; it is just an opportunistic grab of people’s savings. The Bill has most unfortunate side effects. As we will show in later amendments, it will not raise the £5 billion that the OBR has been led to believe it will. It will fall far short of that. Proof of that, of course, is in the fact that even the OBR recognises that that £5 billion will fall by half the following year, as people work out what is going on and take evasive action. The reason it will not raise £5 billion is that people will work out, well in advance of it coming into 2029, that there are simple ways round this Bill that already have been identified, and therefore will take pre-emptive action. We are stuck with a Bill that does not work, is not needed and, workers having been penalised by the national insurance increase, penalises savers. In particular, for some bizarre reason, it penalises students who have taken out loans. This is not a good time to be making these proposals. The Minister, a few minutes ago, suggested that the Chancellor believes that people will be £1,000 a year better off by the time of the next election. Will they really? The Joseph Rowntree Foundation—no friends of mine—has said that when housing costs from rent and mortgage payments were factored into those figures, total disposable income would have risen by just £40 a year. No pandemic to rely on, no Brexit, no nothing—that is just what it is: £40 a year. This is not the time to impose further hardship on people, in particular students. One benefit of a pension salary sacrifice can be to reduce earnings liable to national insurance for student loan repayment purposes, as the liability to repay student loans is, for employees, based on their earnings liable to national insurance. Frankly, there remains a lack of clarity about how the policy interacts with student loan repayment calculations, which are based on national insurance definitions of earnings. If salary sacrifice pension contributions above the cap are treated as earnings for NIC purposes, this will have knock-on effects for graduate repayment levels. It will mean higher effective repayments for some borrowers, reduced disposable income and a further distortion of incentives around pension savings. The Government have not yet provided sufficient clarity. My amendments seek to address that situation. I am grateful to the national press, in particular the Times, for its support of this amendment. I hope later to be able to test the opinion of the House on it, unless the Government feel inclined to agree to it.