Torsten Bell

I recognise the point the hon. Member is making, which is that the nature of insolvency and entering into the PPF will have made more of a difference than future PPF accruals. However, had a previous Government—for example, the one that included the Liberal Democrats—introduced pre-1997 indexation a decade back, it would have made significantly more than a 5% difference. That would have made a very large difference to the pensions that AEAT members are living on today. I am responsible for what the Government are doing about indexation now, and it is a lot more than 5%, because even in just the last years inflation has been running at particularly high levels. I do not agree with the hon. Member’s calculation, but I do agree with him that that is definitely not the entire story. I totally understand that members’ feeling about the advice they received back in the 1990s is at the core of their view that they should never have been in a situation where their pensions were transferred out of the public sector in the first place, and he is right to say that that issue is different from the indexation that occurs within the PPF. I am merely pointing out that the reviews the hon. Member has mentioned, including that of the Public Accounts Committee, focused on the issue of indexation. My best bet is that, if the Government were not acting on this issue, it would have been one of the issues he raised with us here today, but he is completely right to say that it is not everything. I have said what we are doing to address the lack of indexation: we are acting where previous Governments failed to do so, and acting because we can all put ourselves in the shoes of pensioners who have not seen their pension incomes live up to what they were expecting, through no fault of their own. Let me close by again congratulating the hon. Member on securing this debate and for giving us the opportunity to speak on such an important subject. I appreciate that I cannot and have not offered everything that he and, indeed, AEAT scheme members would want, but this Government are making real, concrete changes to better protect the pensions of those members from inflation in the years to come. That cannot right all of their feelings about what has happened in the past, but as I say, this Government are choosing to act rather than promising another review in the months and years ahead. Question put and agreed to.