Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD)

My Lords, this group concerns defined benefits, fairness and redress. Amendment 216 in my name asks for independent reviews into serious, alleged injustices affecting scheme members. It is broad and seeks an independent review into injustices in occupational pension schemes caused by actions or omissions of employers, sponsors or administrators, including failures of communication, governance and redress mechanisms. A number of campaigners and victims of injustices have reached out to share their stories; we hope that the Government will take this amendment forward in order to send a clear message to those campaigners that the Government will listen to them and rectify any wrongs that exist. I turn to Amendment 218 in my name. I have had lots of information from the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, who cannot be with us today; I will try to incorporate that into what I say, so noble Lords will get two speeches for one here. In our earlier debate in Committee on the amendment designed to assist members of the AEAT pension scheme’s closed section, who were advised to transfer all of their accrued pre-1997 pension rights into a new private sector pension scheme on the privatisation of part of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the Minister stated in her response—she will remember this—that the case around AEAT pensions “has been fully considered”. She specified that there had been “reviews by three relevant ombudsmen, debates in the Commons in 2015 and 2016 and a report by the NAO in 2023. This matter has also been considered by previous Governments in the period since AEAT went into the PPF, all of whom reached the same conclusion”.—[Official Report, 5/2/26; col. GC 668.] It is clear that the Minister and the Committee were being told that thorough investigations had found that there was no case for remedying the loss of promised government protection of these pension rights. That is just not correct, I am afraid. It is important to set the record straight today; I hope to do so, guided by the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, who has given me some notes on this as well. There has been no ombudsman investigation of the core issue, which is the closed-section AEAT pensioners, now mainly in their 70s to 90s, who were misled on privatisation in 1996 by a GAD document to transfer the historic Treasury-backed—that is the point; they were Treasury-backed—public sector UKAEA benefits into the new privatised-company AEAT scheme. They were not informed that the new scheme did not have the same security, despite reassurances in both Houses of Parliament that their pensions were safe.