Torsten Bell

I am going to make a bit of progress, and then I will give way to the hon. Member. The truth is that reform was inevitable. Although Conservative Members are not saying it now, they know this is true, because it is what they said in government. In the 2015 summer Budget, they said: “Salary sacrifice arrangements…are becoming increasingly popular and the cost to the taxpayer is rising”— [Interruption.] I will come on to what the last Government wanted to do in the pensions space in a second. I am glad that the hon. Member for North Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) is so keen to hear this; he is setting me up nicely for what is coming in a second. The summer Budget of 2015 went on to say: “The government will actively monitor the growth of these schemes and their effect on tax receipts”, which is the same argument that I just made to the right hon. Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison). That monitoring led, a year later, to the then Chancellor—now Baron Hammond of Runnymede—announcing benefit-in-kind restrictions. He told this House: “The majority of employees pay tax on a cash salary, but some are able to sacrifice salary…and pay much lower tax… That is unfair”.—[Official Report, 23 November 2016; Vol. 617, c. 907.] He was right then, and the same argument holds today. Former Conservative Ministers should certainly agree, because in government they were planning exactly the kind of change to pensions that we are now introducing. By way of proof, in 2023 the Conservatives commissioned research on restricting salary sacrifice arrangements for pensions, which is exactly the same measure they are opposing today. What was the proposed cap on pension salary sacrifice in that report? It was £2,000 a year, which is exactly the same cap they are opposing today.