Baroness Coffey (Con)

My Lords, this is an interesting group of amendments. My noble friend has explained the importance of clarity in who decides whether something is fully delivering. I want to ask about the different assessments being made at this point. We are now, effectively, on Clause 15 onwards. We have the ratings coming through. My noble friends on the Front Bench will explain why they do not agree with certain elements. There is merit, however, in trying to work out whether something is taking a nosedive and whether it is it fixable, but we need to be more specific about a reasonable period, and then a prescribed number of VFM periods needs to be put in the Bill, which it is not at the moment. Thinking through what has been suggested, I am trying to understand how this will work. Clause 13, which we have discussed briefly, has a certain amount of potential calculations. We then have the trustees doing their own assessment, and then we jump forward to Clause 18 and the Pensions Regulator may check. This is all feeling quite random. Normally when we do ratings, the CQC or Ofsted make that judgment, so I am trying to understand how this will work in practice. Are the guidelines going to be fixed—for example, the average or the benchmark across all pension schemes is this, or the FTSE 100 index has changed this much, or the costs are this percentage? It would be helpful to start to get a proper pitch. I appreciate that the consultation may have gone out, but there must be thinking in the Government’s mind, not just the regulator’s, on what “good” looks like. There are risks, as identified by my noble friends, that we may be overburdening to the point that the minutiae become an industry in their own right. I am surprised to see the penalties put in primary legislation, which is unusual nowadays, although I agree that we need a better sense of how that compliance element, as set out in Clause 18, will work alongside the other amendments. My noble friend is right to say that we need to keep this straightforward and simple for people to be able to understand.