Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, what assessment he has made of the effect of the quantitative easing programme on defined benefit pension schemes.

Monetary policy is set independently by the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank of England. The minutes to the MPC’s August meeting, in which the Committee expanded its asset purchase programme, noted that ‘lower yields posed potential risks to some aspects of the functioning of the financial system, for example by increasing the deficits of many pension funds’ but concluded that ‘at present, however, those effects appeared to be relatively limited’.