Pension Schemes Bill

Lord Evans of Guisborough Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 18th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con)]

My Lords, I should preface my remarks by declaring an interest in that I am a member of the Local Government Pension Scheme. I am, of course, much too young to be drawing any benefits from that scheme as yet.

It is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Trenchard, who gave us a good, detailed critique of the Bill and made a number of constructive suggestions. Indeed, it is even more of a pleasure to be following—well, everybody, really. The Minister pointed out the generosity of the Whips this morning; when I looked at the list, I discovered they had been even more generous in giving me basically the last slot of the last debate of the year, at least from the Back Benches—the Front Benches can follow up afterwards. Bearing that in mind, I will keep my remarks mercifully brief and focus on a couple of the contributions that people have made during this extremely informative and interesting debate.

First, I congratulate and thank the noble Baroness, Lady White of Tufnell Park, for her excellent maiden speech. It was interesting and, I think, will be inspiring to people from outside this place who see that clip. I know that she will bring a great deal of expertise to us here, and I look forward to her future contributions.

Secondly, I thank my noble friend Lady Noakes, who raised the spectre of the dead hand of regulation, as it has been referred to at times in the past, and the concern that if we regulate schemes too much, we will discourage new schemes or even make it impossible for them to open up and operate, which will harm competition. We have already seen this in recent years with the situation that pertains to challenger banks in the UK, because a lot of the financial rules that were set up after the market crash made it very difficult for new banks and new financial institutions to gather the capital and put in place the administration they needed to start up. I believe that the Treasury has relaxed some of those rules recently to enable more people to take part in the financial market. I hope that the Government will reflect on that and not repeat mistakes that have been made in the past.

I shall refer briefly to the contribution from my noble friend Lady Altmann, who gave us an informed and passionate plea to encourage pension providers to invest more of the money they have in UK assets. I was quite persuaded by that, but saying to investors, “We’d like you to invest a percentage of your assets and you get to decide, with all your expertise, knowledge and experience, what you invest them in”, is very different from being asked to give the Minister permission to make a much more detailed investment decision on their behalf, with what, in effect, is other people’s money. I think that is what we are being asked to do in the Bill.

I hope we will revisit the whole mandation issue and help to moderate it or even remove it from the Bill altogether. I would go out on a limb and say that I would trust the Minister to make investment decisions on my behalf, but that does not mean that I would trust future Ministers and future Governments to do so. That is not just about the sort of people with the sort of ideas who might occupy those posts in the future; it is also about the sort of challenges that the Government may face and the sort of temptations that this legislation may lay open to them at a time when future years are looking difficult and unpredictable.

I mostly welcome what is in the Bill. There has been a tendency today to focus on the things we do not like about it; that is the job of scrutiny. Back in the 1990s, I worked for a visionary entrepreneur, and he used to say that in the future there will be no such thing as security of employment but there will be security of employability. He was running a training company, so your Lordships can maybe understand why he said that, and we have moved a long way towards embracing the new jobs market since then, but the pensions market needs to catch up. A lot of the measures in the Bill will help us to do that.