Baroness Coffey (Con)

My Lords, Clause 49 is quite interesting. Clearly, we have been on a journey for some time. Going back 35 years, Maxwell raided his pension fund, completely screwing over his employees at the time, which led to the 1995 Act as a consequence. There were other items in there as well, but that brought in a much more controlling approach to aspects of pensions. One of the liberations that happened in the previous pensions Acts a decade ago was that people did not have to do a particular thing with their money. I know this is money that was topped up by aspects of tax relief and the like but, ultimately, instead of being forced in a particular direction with an annuity in a different way, people had a choice. I am conscious that various scams happened when people were transferred from one to another. I hope those people will find a special place in hell; they have deprived people of the money that they had rightly gathered over the years and scammed them out of it. But ultimately this did give a choice to people, with all that money, about how they wanted to spend their retirement—instead of somebody else telling them what to do. I am concerned that this clause, in effect, requires a guaranteed solution. I appreciate that my noble friend Lady Noakes has talked particularly about removing the need for there to be a regular income as part of this solution, but if benefit solutions are going to be required by this legislation, there should not just be a choice of a minimum of one. There should be at least two, so that people can still have that choice. That is why in Clause 49(1)(a), I think that “one or more” should be “a minimum of two”, if that is going to be the way that we go. The other thing that is not clear to me—perhaps I just have not spent enough time reading this—is what happens if people do not want the default pension. What choice do they have? It does not feel as though they have any choice at all. I am trying to understand something: what is the real problem that Ministers and the Government are trying to address here? Do not get me wrong—we want to make pensions as simple as possible for people. I know that my former employer used to set up a particular approach, saying that it was easy and that you could buy into it, but it was your choice what you did. That is why I am concerned about Clause 49 in particular. I hope that, by the time we get to Report, the Minister will have reconsidered whether ripping away freedoms is the right way for the people whom the Bill is intended to support.