Dame Angela Eagle
MP for Wallasey · Labour · United Kingdom
“The Kremlin increasingly relies on proxy organisations to pursue its objectives, seeking to undermine our security while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability. The so-called GRU Volunteer Corps is a clear example of that approach. It is not an independent force or a loose collection of volunteers.”
“This Government have introduced support for the Jewish communities who have been threatened and directly targeted by IRGC proxies. Just a couple of days ago, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced an extra £250 million for policing to ensure that we can support and protect our Jewish communities.”
“I will move on to the Islamic Movement of Companions of the Right. The IMCR has publicly claimed seven attacks at UK locations linked to Jewish and Israeli communities and to Persian-language media, including the antisemitic arson attack on four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green on 23 March.”
“We expect platforms to act responsibly and not to provide space for state threat-linked activity, propaganda or recruitment. We will be keeping a close eye on that, as well as liaising with social media companies to tell them about how this law impacts them.”
“The IRGC Quds Force and the IRGC Intelligence Organisation, together with the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, form the Iranian intelligence apparatus. As a key component of the Iranian state’s security apparatus, the IRGC is answerable directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader.”
“It provides a targeted and proportionate means of disrupting those involved in foreign power threat activity based on the recommendations of Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of state threat legislation. To answer the hon.”
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“Q The Bill also contains powers for the PRA and the FCA to create a prudential regulation; an entire new system for credit institutions and investment firms. Do you represent such companies? Constance Usherwood: Yes, we do.”
“I notice that there have been a couple of smaller consultations done recently by the PRA that have only required a month or two months for consultation, and certainly that is something we hope will be fully considered when they put the rules before industry.”
“Q So are you happy with the framework that has been set out in this Bill? Given that it is only a framework and you do not know the details yet, I am assuming that you think the details will be fairly similar to the European directives that the UK had so much input in forming. Constance Usherwood: Yes, I think we support it. One thing that I would note is that there are a lot of rules to implement; the Basel III framework that is going into this part of the Bill is over 160 pages long, so there is a lot of technical detail that will need to be considered. We hope that the full impact assessment is therefore done on that basis for the UK banking sector, and also that the consultation process allows the industry to have a meaningful input.”
“I think that the regulatory authorities are best placed, and the most technically capable of really assessing it, and doing the impact assessment that will ensure that it is tailored to the UK banking sector.”
“Q Is that what you mean when you are talking about accountability—to the companies that are regulated rather than the consumer? Clearly a great deal of detail will have to be decided by the regulatory authorities; we simply cannot do it in primary legislation. Do you think the Bill gets the balance right between setting a framework in primary legislation and allowing the regulatory authorities to do the detailed work? Constance Usherwood: Yes, I think that is probably the best way forward and I agree with the approach that has been taken. The other alternative is that it would all have to come before you and you would have to look at all these pages.”
“The impact assessment is clearly a key feature of financial services rule making, at EU level and at national level. It is part of the broader accountability, which is very important.”
“Q In what period do you expect the impact assessment to arise after the rules have been specified in a consultation period? Is that the kind of process that you would like to see the FCA follow? Constance Usherwood: Usually we would expect the impact assessment to be done before the rules are formalised, but it is a fluid process and I would not be certain what the PRA has in mind. We imagine it would take place at some stage prior to any finalisation of the rules. Adam Farkas: Normally when detailed rules are produced there is some sort of obligation on the authority to provide an impact assessment with it, on the basis of the draft rules. Then, typically, there is a consultation, so opinions are sought from different stakeholders, and then the rules are finalised.”
“Does the Minister agree that it is going to be a mammoth logistical effort, not only to do a vaccination-style thing as we do every year with flu, but to include everybody? Also, it looks as though, in order for the vaccine to be effective, people might have to have two injections rather than one, which doubles the number. Can she give any view at this stage, given the logistical efforts that are going in, of how long it will take us to safely vaccinate everybody in the country?”
“On that point, I thank my right hon. Friend for the way he is championing consumer advice in this very difficult space. Does he agree with me that we do not want a stronger nudge, but a great big shove into the arms of impartial, free advice?”
“Does the hon. Gentleman agree that at the moment the decumulation pension industry is unregulated, so there is no transparency on costs or on the kind of charges that may be applied to drawdown schemes? That is another area where people might be being scammed.”
“While I commend the Minister for the huge amount of work he has done, he has unfortunately overturned some of the amendments made in the other place on the dashboard. One of those amendments would have ensured that the first dashboard introduced was the publicly provided objective one, which would have a year to bed in before other commercially offered dashboards were introduced. The other place decided that that would be a good thing to do. The Minister and his Government have decided—he gave us explanations in Committee—that it would not be, and that he wants multifarious dashboards to crop up all over the place, some of which are commercially offered, and some of which I think would just confuse the situation.”
“I support amendments 2 to 5, as well as new clause 6, which is about regulating superfunds. The introduction of the pensions dashboard is one of the things that will mark the Bill as an important piece of pensions legislation. I commend the Minister for all the work he has done to create the capacity for pensions dashboards to be introduced, so that information can be collected from disparate places and presented in a way that is meaningful to consumers. We are now trying to make the pensions dashboard more useful and important and to ensure that it is introduced in a way that does not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Amendments 11, 13, 14 and 15 are about how the dashboard should work.”
“Because our capacity to deal with fraud in this country has been eaten away, meaning that it is not nearly as good as it should be and needs to be improved massively, the chances of scammers being caught are quite low too. The potential for high rewards from conning people out of their life savings versus the risks taken means that we are a magnet for scammers. What we have to do—and what the Bill begins to do—is try to close some of those loopholes. That is what amendments 2 to 5 are about. It is also about regulating superfunds, which is covered in new clause 6, and creating the new criminal offences that we all agreed with in Committee, to try to strengthen regulation, put up some real barriers and increase the risk that those who are trying to con people out of their pensions will be caught.”
“As we all know, consumer protections are quite weak, and the introduction of so-called pension freedoms in 2014 increased the chances for mis-selling and scams, so we have to be very careful. That is why I support new clause 1. I support any protections that will make it slightly more inconvenient for people to shift their money and that will reassure regulators, providers and customers of pensions that this decision is the right one for them, because, as we have heard, it is irreparable. I do not agree with those who have said that we have enough protection against scams. The cost of losing a pension is huge and irreparable. The risks for scammers and con artists are quite low, but the minimum rewards are huge.”
“The first is strengthening consumer protections, which is what new clause 1 is about, and ensuring that when people are making an irreparable decision about probably some of the largest amount of funds they have laid aside for their entire lives in savings, they do not get their heads turned by slick advertising at one end and con artists at the other, and that they get enough time, space and consideration to make the choice that is right for them. Our pensions landscape is very complex, and it is getting more and more complex as it matures, changes and evolves. We are left trying to deal in legislation with DB schemes, DC schemes and CDC schemes, which we all welcome, but all these changes and innovations over time make the pensions landscape difficult for people to navigate.”
“It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Shaun Bailey) in this reasonably consensual debate. Madam Deputy Speaker, there is nothing like seeing men rushing into the Chamber in hazmat suits to ensure that we are as brief as we possibly can be, even though—and this is no criticism of the Chair—the grouping of these amendments means we have rather a lot of things to refer to in this gigantic group. One of the things I am going to do is to refer only in passing to new clause 1, because so much has already been said about it, and I will concentrate a bit more of my remarks on the pensions dashboard and some of those amendments, because that has not really received much attention in the comments we have had so far. There are some themes that are really important to bear in mind in this group and the Bill.”
“Despite the fact that we are having this boxing match about scams and strengthening the rules against them, increased consumer protections and increased transparency, I think that everyone on both sides of the House will note that the Pension Schemes Bill, when it becomes law, will take forward some of the work that needs to be done to try to ensure that all our constituents, whether they are of a younger generation or a slightly older one, can look forward to a framework that will guarantee them some reasonable income in retirement. I do not think that anyone on either side of the House would argue with that.”
“People argue that it will just confuse consumers to know how much money is being taken out of their funds in charges or fees. I would say that the opposite is true. The more transparency we have in the dashboard, the better. I know that others will speak about investment philosophies and amendments 16 to 24, which are also in this group, so I will leave that to them. Overall, the Bill is a good thing. The introduction of CDCs is an extremely good thing.”
“I thank the Minister for that point. We had this discussion in Committee, and we are having it again on the Floor of the House. I think it is worth exploring, but within the context that I think dashboards are a good idea. With new amendments, the Opposition are trying to get more information in the dashboard, which the Minister is trying to keep a bit simpler. The information that our amendments would introduce into dashboards includes fees, charges, costs and price—information that I would say is quite important to consumers who are thinking about where to put their money or whether to switch their money around. In what other area where services were being bought would we try to hide the price of the service that is being offered in quite this way?”
“I knew John Golding, and he never spoke for one second longer than he needed to for a particular political purpose. I know that he spoke for that length of time because he was conducting some parliamentary manoeuvres that were extremely important for the progressive cause.”
“The Prime Minister spoke for many of us when he took a call yesterday to congratulate President-elect Biden and Vice-President-elect Harris on their emphatic win in the US presidential election, so does the Prime Minister now have any advice for his erstwhile best friend, President Trump, whose continuing refusal to accept the result is both embarrassing for him and dangerous for American democracy?”
“May I also express the thanks of my constituents for the work that the armed forces have been doing in response to the coronavirus pandemic? The Minister has already revealed to the House that the number of MACA requests has quadrupled this year, for understandable reasons. As we approach the end of the year, with the potential for a vaccine to be deployed and, it has to be said, some of the pressures that will be placed on the country as a result of Brexit, is he confident that all future MACA requests will be able to be met because he has the appropriate capacity?”
“Will the Chancellor now admit that his premature wind-down of furlough, which he had scheduled to finish last weekend, in the middle of what many people expected to be a second wave, was actually a mistake? Will he admit that the virus does not conform to Treasury models or his own timetable for it to disappear? Will he continue to show flexibility? Will he confirm, for the avoidance of doubt, that if the current lockdown ends on 2 December, the furlough scheme will still be available to all those across the country, whatever tier of restrictions they are put back into?”
“The Minister talks about the third way. Will he also take a little time in his opening remarks to recognise that pensions policy is best if it is done cross-party? We are dealing with changes to the Pensions Act 2004, which was cross-party legislation that introduced opting in. Changes and tweaks to the system are far more likely to last across different Governments and across time if we have some form of cross-party consensus. It is not only a third way. The only way we will end up with a workable pensions scheme is by building in sustainability across Governments and across time. As a former Pensions Minister who put the auto-enrolment regulations on to the statute book prior to our loss of office in 2010, I am committed to cross-party working and I hope that the Minister is, too.”
“Clearly, the changes that the Bill would make allow for pioneering in the CDCs that Royal Mail and the CWU have introduced to be put into effect. Will the Minister say a little about how other organisations —smaller employers, perhaps—might try to get into the CDC space? Clearly, Royal Mail and the CWU are an unusual combination, both in the size of the industry and their buy-ins—very few employers are of the same size as the CWU, which represents its members, and Royal Mail, which wishes to offer this particular CDC.”
“The Minister is trying to achieve fairness across cohorts, and different people will have different interpretations of that. Such schemes are reliant on the general performance of the stock market, investment and what is going on in the world economy. Does he agree that fairness is subject to all those swings and roundabouts? Will the Minister give the Committee some idea of what he would regard as fair, given that annuities were grossly unfair for those who happened to retire at a time when the market was taking a dip? What would he regard as “fairness” in the requirement that he will put in regulations?”
“We are here to tease out what the Government mean in the Bill, ahead of the unamendable regulations that have not yet been written. I hope that the Minister will indulge our temerity in using the Bill Committee to ask some relevant questions. What the Minister said earlier about the Dutch schemes is correct. By reducing the available pensions, some choices were made between existing pensioners and those who were saving. His tone suggested that he judged that to be unfair. He states that he wants to achieve fairness between cohorts in CDCs, but how will that be done in reality?”
“I thank the Minister for the further explanation, but is he saying that he does not yet know how this will work, because the regulations have not been written? Is he stating that he wants to achieve a certain principle without yet knowing how it will be achieved?”
“I thank my right hon. Friend for making points that are difficult to argue against. What effect does he believe the age of pension fund trustees is likely to have on the intergenerational fairness points that I pressed the Minister on in our previous discussion?”
“Friend is asking only for the publication of information. He is not doing what I might do, which would be much more radical and would probably include all sorts of things, such as quotas and positive action, in order to make a real difference quite quickly. It is a modest amendment. If the Minister cannot accept that it is and does not have the good grace to support it, I will be rather disappointed.”
“He is asking us to exchange something that is really quite good and not damaging for something that is very nebulous and does not exist yet—it might do at some point in the future—in regulations that will be unamendable. We will have to take them or leave them when they come to the House, so I am slightly worried about that. As is his wont, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham has zeroed in on the issue of diversity on boards and given us some shocking figures about what is happening on pension trustee boards. That ought to raise many alarm bells about potential group-think and about how the decisions made by trustee boards are not representing the interests of the many people who have pension savings in a way that we would find modern or appropriate. Amendment 25 is a modest amendment. My right hon.”
“Just because it is difficult to define, it does not mean that we should not assert it or seek to bring it about. The Minister’s response is a rather a technical answer to the principle that has been asserted by the change that their lordships made to this part of the Bill. His responses to my questions earlier did not fill me with confidence that he knew how the principle would be brought about if the amendment that their lordships put in the Bill was taken out. He simply seemed to say that it was a good thing to assert, and that it would be brought about by regulations that have not yet been written. He could not really give us any thoughts about how it might be guaranteed in the future, although he is asking us to take out an amendment that has actually been made to the Bill.”
“I want to support, or enhance, the comments that have just been made by Opposition Members about the two issues that we are discussing in this group of amendments: amendment 25 on diversity, which was tabled my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham, and the issue of intergenerational fairness and how it can be properly guaranteed in CDC schemes. I hope the Minister will reaffirm on the record, in no uncertain terms, his agreement with the principles behind the amendment on intergenerational fairness that was made in the other place, even if he has issues with how one defines fairness in law. I have to say that, in social justice terms, we would have made very little progress in the whole of our society if we quibbled about the meaning of fairness in law.”
“They know that there are scams and that a range of people out there—from the great killer sharks who loot pension schemes, to those who do dodgy things at the margins—are causing people who were saving into pension schemes, in good faith, to lose benefits in retirement. How will the Minister drive the Pensions Regulator to be far more proactive and effective? Later, we will come to the Bill’s measures on scamming and the even worse end of bad behaviour, but that is for a future part of the Bill. I hope the Minister can reassure us that he will insist that the regulator transforms its passive attitude into a much more aggressive one that not only actively deters but drives this appalling behaviour out of the whole of the pension scene.”
“I support my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham, who has crystallised some of the dangers in private sector schemes. I do not want to add to the excoriating verdict of his predecessor Committee in the two cases mentioned, except to say that this does have an effect on the willingness of individuals to save into pension schemes. Although people might not know the detail of this behaviour and the losses it has caused to retirement income, some out there in the ether will use the lack of effective protection that has resulted from the failure both of regulation and in pursuing effectively those who engage in this kind of larceny. Individuals who may otherwise be pension savers choose not to save into a pension and regard it as a bit of a mug’s game because their money is not properly protected.”
“We have the confluence of many different sorts of pension availability, from the much more effective DB schemes, which used to be more common but in which 10 million people still have savings, it has to be pointed out, to the evolving and developing DC and individual savings schemes.”
“Many of us who have been involved in pensions policy making—in Opposition, in Government or both—know that the holy grails in this area are: first, to get people to think about pension saving in the first place; secondly, to get people, especially when they are younger, to think that they may ever reach retirement age, and to start planning for what their income might be when they get there; and thirdly, having established from a young age that interest in considering what their income will be when they are older and in setting money aside to ensure that they have a secure income, to ask them to navigate the current pensions landscape in the UK, which is asking an awful lot of most of our citizens, because it is extremely complicated and changes over time.”
“It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair this afternoon, Mr Robertson, after the dynamic chairing from your colleague this morning; we made a lot of progress. I will make some observations about dashboards, and talk particularly about Government amendment 7, which, as colleagues know, removes the Drake amendment that was added in the other place. However, I will first comment on how potentially beneficial a good working pensions dashboard coming into existence would be for many millions of pensioners looking to plan for their retirement.”
“The hon. Member for Delyn was right to say that pots that are very small are being eaten away by charges. Most people who put money into pots would have had no real knowledge or understanding of the price of keeping that money there, because it would not have been up front in the information; it would have been hidden away in hundreds or perhaps thousands of pages of tiny print. The amendments, which I fully support, are all about getting price and cost transparency on the dashboard, which was clearly created to include such information. I will not understand it at all if the Minister has reasons for not doing so.”
“I want to briefly add some emphasis to the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston from the Front Bench. This is really a battle between those who like to add horrendously high charges, in very small print, and transparency so that people can make decisions in possession of the right kind of information. Surely enabling that transparency is at the heart of what the pensions dashboard is all about. Financial services, particularly things like pensions, have always featured a uniquely complex, difficult and opaque pricing system, which can often eat away significantly at the money that people who are investing can expect to live on when they retire. Thankfully, trail commission has now been abolished, at least to my knowledge, but it has been replaced with other opaque pricing systems that take people’s money away.”
“I thank the Minister for his full explanation of some of the work that is ongoing, and I appreciate that it is a difficult issue. First, will he give the Committee some idea of the timescale for when we could get that important information into the dashboards? Could he be a bit more specific? Secondly, does he not accept that if standardisation is mandated by the Government, people will adjust and change in order to standardise and be in competition with other providers? It will bring some coherence to what is at the moment an extremely complex and confusing area.”
“Before we leave this point, what the Minister has described is a pensions landscape that is so complex that he is saying it is almost impossible to make proper price comparisons across the piece. If a consumer wants to make a decision on where to invest their money, what the Minister is saying is that at the moment we have a system that is so complex, and where comparisons are so hard to make, that it is impossible. What does that say about the landscape we are presiding over, and what have we got wrong? I have some ideas of my own, but now is not the time to talk about them, Mr Robertson. I appreciate that. It is an astonishing admission from the Minister that that is the situation we are in.”
“Did the Chancellor veto an earlier, shorter circuit breaker lockdown, or can the 40 days of dither and delay that are likely to cost thousands of extra lives lost and billions in damage to our economy all be laid at the door of the Prime Minister?”
“It seems the Chancellor’s much-vaunted winter economic plan has not even lasted the autumn. His tinkering with the system demonstrates that he has been behind the curve all along, and it has sowed hardship and confusion. Why is the support he offered in March not being replicated as the virus comes back and we are suffering a second wave in October? Why is he trying to achieve local lockdowns on the cheap?”
“I am sure the Secretary of State will agree with me that to be effective, rules must be understandable and simple. Why in Merseyside, which is currently in tier 3, were all the gyms forced to close, but soft play was left open, and in Lancashire all the gyms were left open and soft play was closed? Surely that does not make any sense at all. Will he publish the evidence that he has and be consistent across tiers? Either all the gyms are open or they should all close. Which is it to be?”
“In the Liverpool city region, which contains my constituency of Wallasey, there is £40 million of unspent support for business that the Chancellor generously granted in the first wave of the pandemic. Given that we are in tier 3, will he say today at the Dispatch Box that he will release that £40 million so that the local authorities in the Liverpool city region can apply that money to help their local businesses during this highest level of lockdown that we are suffering at the moment?”
“It has to pay more to those whose jobs are affected. We need wider eligibility; it has to go to businesses that are affected, not only those that close. We need to include the excluded, which means freelancers and the self-employed, and we need to pay adequate sick pay to those forced to isolate. If we do not do that, the virus will roar back, the economic cost will, in the end, be far greater, and the cost in lives will be unbearable.”
“They want a Government who will recognise the hardship that the pandemic has caused and be there to help. The least that the Government could have done was repurpose the £40 million in unspent support allocated to the Liverpool city region, which is now in tier 3, to support local businesses, but again today the Chancellor has refused even that modest request. Those forced to self-isolate to stop the spread of the virus need the support to do so and not to have to choose between feeding their family and obeying the rules. Wirral Council, which has been at the forefront of the fight against the virus, has not been reimbursed for what this has cost and, like many other local authorities, it is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. So what do we need? We need an increase in the generosity of the furlough-lite scheme.”
““We will do whatever it takes” has now turned into the inadequate furlough-lite proposals that the Chancellor has recently come up with. Just as the virus returns, he has packed up the safety net. For my constituents in Wallasey, who are now in tier 3 and facing a local lockdown, vital support disappears at the end of the month. In Wirral, 31,000 people are still on furlough and it will disappear at the end of the month, just as the virus comes roaring back. What replaces it is completely inadequate, as the Chancellor knows only too well, and those who are losing their jobs or their business do not want a lecture from him about how much he has already spent. Those who are excluded completely from this support in the first place—the freelancers, some of the self-employed—do not want that lecture either.”
“His failure to take timely and firm action will cost more lives and wreak more damage on our economy. As he courts his mutinous Back Benchers and abandons the science to keep them sweet, all the warning signs are flashing red again. He is behind the curve and he knows it, and since the SAGE minutes were published on Monday night, we all know it, too. The Government have lost the trust that they need to lead the fight against this deadly threat. Their partisan, high-handed behaviour has made it worse, excluding Parliament completely. There are constant briefings to the media, and an obsession with outsourcing and centralisation has caused the failure of test and trace and the scandal of PPE supplier contracts to Tory donors.”