Baroness Altmann (Non-Afl)

My Lords, I fully support everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, said. I am very sad to be in the position of needing to do so, because I support the Government’s aim of helping pension schemes to put more money into UK investments and growth. However, the way in which it is being done is the issue here, with unlimited powers and not incentives but diktats. If you threaten a pension scheme that, unless it does what you want, it cannot auto-enrol workers in this country then clearly that is not any kind of carrot; it is just a big stick. Incentivisation is normally what we do to encourage pension investments, and it is what we should be doing. One of my amendments would achieve that, but if the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, is successful with Amendment 52, we will not need to go into those details. I hope that the Government, even at this late hour, will rethink their approach to have a two-step approach: to have a voluntary agreement and commit to do certain things, but then the second step would be, if the voluntary agreement was not stuck to or if schemes did not do any of the things that they said that they were going to do, that they would force schemes to do what they wanted anyway. That is not the way to make the best of people’s pensions, and I hope that the Government will think again.