Lincoln Jopp
MP for Spelthorne · Conservative · United Kingdom
“The Minister said the purpose of sanctions was to deter, disrupt and demonstrate. Would he like to give the Committee the two best examples he has come across of who the parties were and what they were deterred from doing, and who the parties were and what they were disrupted from doing?”
House of Commons28 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“When President Trump met Xi Jinping last month, the US President raised with the Chairman the case of imprisoned British citizen Jimmy Lai. Has the Minister had a readout from that conversation, and what can he tell us about his own efforts to bring about Jimmy Lai’s release?”
House of Commons27 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“He said, “Say to the platoon commander what you’ve just said to me.” This guy looked me in the eye and said, “I’ve got a bomb in the back of this vehicle.” Now, fortunately, I knew that he was lying, but the drill at the time was that you grabbed a hold of this witness, took him out of the car and did not let go until the bomb disposal pe…”
House of Commons19 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I asked my boss, who was a brilliant civil servant, “Who won?” He did actually answer that question, but the answer he gave me is probably not something that would help our debate today. Suffice it to say that the Good Friday agreement left that out there as a question—who won? That was necessary; it was a peace agreement.”
House of Commons19 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The word “essential”, which has been substituted for “new and compelling”, does not do it for me, because I heard the Secretary of State on the radio this morning, saying, “‘Essential’ to my mind means completely new evidence or a new forensic procedure,” but that is the Secretary of State’s interpretation of it.”
House of Commons19 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Secretary of State, I think in good faith, has been attempting to bring various parties together and ensure that this legislation has—I think this was the phrase of the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Leeds South (Hilary Benn)—the confidence of all parties. The trouble is that it does not.”
House of Commons19 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
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“A fifth of employers reported that the removal of the unfair dismissal qualifying period and the introduction of the new statutory probation period will make them less likely to recruit from those groups. I want to make one last point. It is obviously a big thing to take on new employees and assimilate them into teams. Culture eats strategy for breakfast in business, and those crucial hires are some of the biggest decisions that any employer will make. I have taken part in hundreds of interview boards, and often, there is what is identified as the “risk candidate”. They are the different person, who thinks differently from the employer. They are the person the employer does not fully understand. More often than not, they are the person the employer should employ.”
House of Commons16 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Of the organisations that expected the Employment Rights Bill to increase employment costs, nearly a fifth reported that they are more likely to rely on temporary workers, while 10% reported that they will increase their use of what they call “a typical workers and self-employed contractors”. The legislation is not improving the lot of employees; it is reducing the number of employees, as employers find alternative solutions. That potential shift to more temporary forms of employment is much higher in certain sectors. In addition, some employers anticipate recruiting fewer workers who may need more support, such as young workers or those with health conditions.”
House of Commons16 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The conclusions from the report were that eight out of 10 employers believed that certain measures in the Bill, such as changes to unfair dismissal rules and the introduction of the new statutory probation period, will have the effect of increasing their workforce costs. Of those organisations, four in 10 expected to have to raise prices as a result, and a quarter said that they will cancel or scale down plans to invest or expand their business. Of the organisations that said that employment costs will rise, almost a third anticipated cutting headcount due to reduced hiring or redundancies, and a further fifth reported that they will reduce overtime and/or bonuses, and cut spending on staff training.”
House of Commons16 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“About half of the employers surveyed believed that, overall, the ERB measures will negatively affect employment at their organisation. When we look at how employers plan to respond to the seven measures, one by one, we can see that between 5% and 20% of employers indicate that each of the measures will lead them to reduce staff through redundancies and/or recruiting fewer workers to their organisations. So much for the No. 1 mission of growth. Out of the measures proposed, the planned changes to the rules on unfair dismissal are expected to have the largest negative impact on employers’ recruitment and redundancy intentions.”
House of Commons16 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Looking at the overall cost of the reforms, the Regulatory Policy Committee said: “The direct impact on business estimate does not account for the likelihood employers may offset the costs of regulation and mandated benefits through wage adjustments, benefit reductions or other compensatory mechanisms which would eventually be borne by the employee.” Let us see what other people think of the impact assessment. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development published a report in April 2025 entitled “The (Unintended) Consequences of the Employment Rights Bill”. Its survey of 2,000 employers showed that about eight in 10 believed that the measures in the Employment Rights Bill will increase their employment costs.”
House of Commons16 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“My right hon. Friend makes a very good point. When these measures kick in, we could see the law of unintended consequences playing out, with a series of compound impacts. The RPC said that the fundamental basis for the creation of the Bill in the first place had not been made, and that there had been insufficient “considerations of alternative options” and an “inadequate assessment” of how the Bill would impact small businesses. Some of the individual impact assessments had “missing business impacts, lack of proportionate monetisation and insufficient assessment of key risks.” The areas in the impact assessment with the weakest scrutiny included day one unfair dismissal rights, reforms of trade union legislation, flexible working and third party harassment.”
House of Commons16 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“A few months ago, The Times invited the Chancellor of the Exchequer to address its CEO summit. Just before the Chancellor was called up to the stage, the host reminded the audience that the Chancellor had promised that this would be the most pro-business Government ever. The host then invited the chief executive officers—I think there were 200 of them—to say how many of them, having seen the Labour Government at work, think that it is pro-business. Not a single hand went up. Is the hon. Member aware of that?”
House of Commons16 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I think I am right in saying that the impact assessment’s estimate of a cost of £5 billion was at the higher end, but I read out quite an extensive set of quotations from the RPC saying that it was an inadequate impact assessment and that it completely under-gunned the financial impact of the measures. Does she just think that the RPC is wrong?”
House of Commons16 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I thank the Minister, the shadow Minister and all hon. Members who have contributed to this debate. I fear that it has been a bit of a conversation of the deaf, but we will see whether the number of women employed in this country goes up or down. We will see whether the number of disabled people employed in this country goes up or down. We will see whether these new regulations contribute to growth in the economy, or to further shrinkage and further increases in unemployment. I fear for the British economy; I think we are heading in a really bad direction, and this Employment Rights Bill is going to turbocharge our getting there. Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered the impact of employment rights on businesses.”
House of Commons16 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“10 and the Foreign Office are taking to examine every single thing that Lord Mandelson did when he was our ambassador, in order to establish the extent to which the politically fatal kompromat had skewed his judgment and driven his behaviour.”
House of Commons16 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“10 Downing Street on behalf of a single defence manufacturer for Britain to buy an unmanned military set of equipment—a major buy—without a competition, bypassing UK small and medium-sized enterprises and expertise. I will not put two and two together, but it seems extraordinary that someone who was meant to be promoting British interests overseas was instead promoting US defence capability to No. 10. We buy a lot of good kit from America, of course, but the absence of a competition skews the pitch and is odd behaviour. I hope that when the Minister gets an opportunity to speak, he will talk about what measures No.”
House of Commons16 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am amazed that the Foreign Office has not gone into full lockdown and damage limitation mode, having found out that potentially Lord Mandelson could have been blackmailed this entire time. If it had turned out that he had been an agent of a foreign state, the Foreign Office would have done that. All it knows now is that someone—we do not know who—had politically fatal kompromat on him that whole time. The hon. Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord) talked about some of the behaviours of Lord Mandelson in office, and that is the bit I am concerned about. I do not know whether the Minister is aware that Sir Ben Wallace gave an interview to Times Radio recently in which he said that Lord Mandelson had been lobbying No.”
House of Commons16 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I thank and congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Goole and Pocklington (David Davis) on securing this emergency debate. The focus of the debate thus far has been primarily on three areas: the victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s appalling crimes, the conduct of Lord Mandelson prior to his being appointed and the judgment of the Prime Minister in both appointing and firing Lord Mandelson as the British ambassador to Washington. Quite rightly, in this debate the House has focused on those three areas, but I will add a fourth area that I find as chilling as the other three. Since December last year, our ambassador in Washington has been potentially subject to leverage and blackmail, because someone—we do not know who—had politically fatal kompromat on Lord Mandelson throughout his whole time in office.”
House of Commons16 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am grateful to the Minister for giving way on the negotiations. He is making great play of the fact that the previous Government started the negotiations and that there were 11 rounds of them. Is he not aware that, in 1965, the United Nations passed a resolution saying that we should enter into conversations with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. Those negotiations went on for 17 years and ended in 1981. In 1982, we all know what happened. So it is not where we start; it is where we finish.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“If the Minister is such a big fan of the social time discounting method that has been applied, will he tell the House where the social time discounting method has been used in other parts of Government to generate net present value?”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I do not know whether the hon. Member listened to the outstanding, forensic dismantling of the Government’s case by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), but on the basis that every constituency in this country will kiss away the opportunity to have £52 million as a result of this deal—that is what it is going to cost in total—would he like to tell the people of Dunfermline and Dollar why he would rather give away that amount of money to a foreign Government on a spurious legal basis than invest it in his own constituency?”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am grateful to the hon. and gallant Member for giving way. On the pricing, he said that Government Front Benchers are putting it out that this is a good deal. Would it still be a good deal if it was £35 billion or something like that?”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I visited a nursery in Staines in my constituency, and the head there reported to me that, because of the charging regime and what they can and cannot charge for, every Saturday morning she ends up doing many hours of work on education, health and care plans, for which she cannot pass on the cost. Does the Minister recognise that phenomenon? If so, is it widespread?”
House of Commons4 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“T9. It has been more than a fortnight since the Alaska summit, and the deadline set by President Trump at that time has now passed. What diplomatic efforts are the Government making to maintain US focus on the Ukrainian theatre of operations in the face of Russian intransigence?”
House of Commons2 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to come in on the side of David versus Goliath. Is my right hon. Friend aware that the 10,000 acres being proposed in his constituency could be replaced by 5,000 acres of floating solar on the reservoirs of this country? In my constituency, I have 2,000 acres of raised reservoirs. They are all closed sites; we cannot see the top of them. They are twice as efficient as land-based systems, and they reduce evaporation by 70%. Would that not be a better way of striking a balance than plastering them all over Newark?”
House of Commons2 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Stanwell hotel in my constituency is being used to house asylum seekers. I wrote to Home Office Ministers on 24 July, again on 25 July, and again on 29 July, and I have had zero responses to any of those letters. Please will the Home Secretary show some respect to my constituents and the people of Spelthorne and reply to their questions and concerns?”
House of Commons1 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Spelthorne residents Emma and John lost Holly to cancer in October last year. They set up the charity Holly’s Heroes in her name. Before she died, Holly was given a wheelchair by the NHS, and Emma and John cannot now give it back to the NHS for love nor money. I have raised this with the chief executive of the trust, but can the Secretary of State reassure me that this practice is not replicated nationwide?”
House of Commons22 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I thank the Minister for that answer. On Friday, I had the opportunity to visit the outstanding Springfield primary school in my constituency. It has 500 pupils, 30 of whom have education, health and care plans, with six applications in currently. Can the Minister reassure the parents of those six children and the many, many parents across the country that, while this review into EHCPs is going on, local education authorities will not slow-roll existing applications or fail them as a default in order for them to go to tribunal and try to beat the clock?”
House of Commons21 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Leader of the House mentioned the statement by the Secretary of State for Defence about the super-injunction. The Defence Committee will undoubtedly embark on an inquiry, but before we do, can the Leader of the House state very clearly the Government’s position? Is it ever right to use a super-injunction?”
House of Commons17 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. Following the magnificent success of the England cricket team earlier this week and the triumphal return of Mr Jofra Archer, does the Prime Minister agree that what he needs from his Ministers over the next 12 months is more pace and less spin?”
House of Commons16 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We have been using floating solar technology in this country since 2016. Last month, the French started the largest plant in Europe, producing 74.3 MW. The Chinese have single plants that produce 350 MW. Given the scale of its use across the world, bar Britain, why did the Secretary of State refer to floating solar as a nascent technology? What is nascent about it?”
House of Commons15 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I think it is worth clarifying exactly whether it was a civil servant, a spad or a soldier, because conflating the term “Defence official” to cover members of the armed forces is something that might come back to bite the Secretary of State if he continues to do it.”
House of Commons15 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement and the tone of voice with which he delivered it. I commanded the Scots Guards in 2010 in Afghanistan, at the high watermark of violence. I was very well served by Naz and Mukhtar, and I will always be grateful both to the Ministry of Defence for getting them to Britain and to the communities in this country who have welcomed them to their new lives here. I want to focus on a particular phrase the Secretary of State used. The shadow Secretary of State asked whether it was a civil servant who carried out the leak. The Secretary of State said it was a “Defence official” and The Times is reporting that it was a soldier.”
House of Commons15 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I think the Veterans Minister and the Secretary of State are having a lively debate behind the scenes, but I invite the Secretary of State to listen very carefully to the Veterans Minister, who has the ear of veterans. I think I know where the Veterans Minister is coming from, and I expect the Government to do the right thing.”
House of Commons14 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“To understand the context in which these mendacious and vexatious prosecutions will be pursued, I remind the Secretary of State of the moment when Stormont was recalled because someone had put a vase of flowers in the lobby, and the whole Assembly had to be recalled to debate the colour of the flowers. Why? Because after the Good Friday agreement, everything becomes a proxy answer to the question: who won? The Good Friday agreement was, by necessity, a compromise—it was a peace agreement. However, ever since, everyone has been trying to relitigate the question of who won. It is essential that we do not allow our veterans and their prosecution to become pawns in that proxy game. I will leave it at that.”
House of Commons14 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Veterans Minister knows this well, but there are three components to fighting power: the moral, the physical and the conceptual. It is a very well-known model; Napoleon said, “the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” We undermine the moral component of fighting power at our peril. I was recently appalled to see a GIF that a veteran sent me on my phone. It was a picture of the Prime Minister very recently addressing a number of troops. The subtitle underneath said: “We want you to go to Ukraine to do things which we are going to prosecute you for in 30 years’ time.” We undermine the moral component at our peril.”
House of Commons14 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I said, “Can I fire now?” The instructor said, “This is a very tough moment, but it is a moment to remind yourself, Sir, that it is sometimes better to be tried by 12 men than carried by six.” Pretty chilling—particularly when two of our guardsmen on that tour subsequently had to make a judgment in a shooting situation. One of them believed they had seen a coffee jar in a plastic bag. It turns out that they did not get tried by 12 men; they were tried by one. They were convicted and given life imprisonment. That is the point: all the cases that we have come here to talk about went through a rigorous judicial process at the time. It is horrific double jeopardy, and in some cases treble jeopardy, to put our veterans through that process again.”
House of Commons14 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We were trained, when we went to Northern Ireland, to identify the presence of the abnormal or the absence of the normal in order to set the context. We would see a perceived threat, the threat would build up and we would be invited to fire the round. A little yellow dot would go on to the screen, and our instructor would say, “Congratulations—you have successfully carried out the rules of engagement”. However, the coffee jar bomb presented a massive dilemma. Could we shoot someone simply for having a coffee jar in their hand or being in the process of throwing one? It was purely designed to put soldiers, like me and the 24,000 others who served there, under incredible pressure. I remember one moment with a real dilemma in the cine film.”
House of Commons14 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The IRA would take a small piece of scaffolding and put it in the coffee jar alongside a detonator, a small amount of Semtex and what was affectionately known as “shipyard confetti”. The coffee jar also held a switch from a fridge so that when the jar was thrown and broke on the ground, the bomb went off and the bits went everywhere. We knew that these bombs were incredibly lethal because, a year before, one had been thrown at a dog handler called Darren, who had been feeding his dog. He had watched as his left leg flew 20 metres away, his other leg a smouldering wreck. We knew they were very dangerous. When we were training to deal with these bombs, we went to a cine range. We would be there with a sub-cal, looking at a movie screen that showed a street scene. The film would stop and we would see a threat.”
House of Commons14 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I thank the 170,000 people who signed the petition, particularly those from my Spelthorne constituency. I served four tours in Northern Ireland and dedicated three and a half years of my life to trying to bring peace to that place. My first tour was in Belfast in 1992. It was a guinea a minute—a young Captain Jopp and a young Lieutenant Ben Wallace were on the same tour. The IRA at the time was fully aware of our rules of engagement —the so-called yellow card that has been referred to today. In fact, the IRA designed a whole weapons system around it. It was called the coffee jar bomb. It was a coffee jar, funnily enough—usually Nescafé, although other coffees are available.”
House of Commons14 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I declare an interest as a Surrey Member of Parliament, and my constituency of Spelthorne is the northernmost borough of Surrey. Can I just confirm whether the changes that we are making today still require Spelthorne borough council to give permission for compulsory purchase, when we have handed those powers to Surrey county council?”
House of Commons9 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The first line of defence in national resilience is us, the citizenry. The Health Secretary and the Education Secretary wrote recently lamenting the absence of much-needed grit among many of our young people. Now that that risk has been identified at the highest level of Government, does it appear on the risk register?”
House of Commons8 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We had a long discussion in Committee about assessing how much this regulator was going to cost and how big it was going to be, but all the amendments we put forward were voted down. When will the Minister know that this thing has grown too big and costs too much?”
House of Commons8 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Mercure hotel in Stanwell in my constituency is used to house asylum seekers, and I have had multiple reports of asylum seekers there working illegally. Will the Department please put that on immigration enforcement’s radar, so that it can take the appropriate action?”
House of Commons7 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Before the general election, the Chancellor said that this would be the most pro-business Government ever. She spoke recently at The Times CEO summit. Before she was introduced to the CEOs, the host asked how many of them thought that this Government are still pro-business, and not a single hand went up. Why does the Chief Secretary to the Treasury think that is?”
House of Commons7 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The way in which the Minister is talking about insurance buy-out suggests that, in the Government’s mind, insurance buy-out is still in some way a gold standard. Can he reassure the House that he is seeking to flatten the playing field, such that the increased choice available to defined-benefit pension schemes will mean that for perpetuals who run on—such as OMERS, which started off as the Ontario municipal employees retirement system and is now worth 140 billion Canadian dollars—there is as much safety in superfunds as there is in insurance buy-out?”
House of Commons7 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I was just googling “dirigiste” and my right hon. Friend’s everyman quote. Will he comment on the fact that OMERS, which he would probably agree is one of these megafunds that he thinks are slow and unwieldy and invest in infrastructure and illiquids, returned a 7.1% net return over the last 10 years and the London Pensions Fund Authority returned a 7% return over the last 10 years?”
House of Commons7 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Pensions Regulator did not see why it should take any additional risk if politicians were not going to. I encourage the Minister to have the strength of his convictions to use primarily legislation to tell the Pensions Regulator the market that he wants it to regulate. Then he will give pension superfunds a fighting chance of coming into existence and consolidating. Notwithstanding some of the concerns that others have had, 5,100 of anything is not a working marketplace; it is ripe for consolidation—it was then and it is now.”
House of Commons7 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I do not want the Minister to be in the position of his predecessor, Guy Opperman, who stood in this place and said that greenlighting superfunds was his greatest achievement during lockdown, yet as a result of a combination of the regulatory environment that was put in place and the vested interests of those who argued against the birth of superfunds, the whole concept was strangled at birth. I want the Minister to avoid that, so I encourage him to look back at the first efforts to produce superfunds and tell the Pensions Regulator a great deal more about how it should do its business. The reason why the Pensions Regulator became risk averse was because the last Government refused to cover superfunds in their Pension Schemes Bill, now the Pension Schemes Act 2021.”
House of Commons7 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Will the Minister take a close personal interest in this and change the way that the Pensions Regulator works, so that there are stricter and shorter time limits for assessing suitability—shorter than the limits currently in the Bill, which are six months as a default and nine months as a stretch? In the case of the pensions superfund, we had three applications and a similar timescale was used. One can just imagine why the investors’ patience finally ran out and the whole thing was wound up.”
House of Commons7 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“He might consider: specifying that superfunds should apply a 98% one-year confidence threshold; the creation of a rule similar to the matching adjustment that applies to insurers; extending a VAT exemption to superfunds for essential pension services, such as admin, actuarial and investment, including scheme origination and transfers of the scheme to superfunds; or—I suppose this is an “and/or”—allowing superfunds to use structured capital instruments such as subordinated debt and preferred shares to lower the cost of capital and enhance investment flexibility, without compromising quality. Lastly, I turn to the Pensions Regulator’s process of assessing superfunds and giving them a licence to operate—this is the bit where I have the scars on my back.”
House of Commons7 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“In combination, that means that the capital buffer for a buy-out provider is approximately half that of a superfund under the current interim regime, even taking into account the fact that superfunds are proposed to have a one-year 99% confidence level. The Bill must address that inherent unfairness if, as the Minister wants, the superfund market is to grow. At the moment, it is the proverbial baby who refuses to put on weight. Can the Minister assure me that the Bill will address the problem and create a more level playing field that will allow superfunds to offer the 10% to 15% pricing discount to insurers that his Department has said it is seeking? As the Minister knows, there are a number of techniques for achieving that.”
House of Commons7 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“However, under the current interim guidance, capital requirements for superfunds are about twice those for insurers providing buy-outs, so it is hardly surprising that we have seen a number of recent new entrants to the insurance market but no new superfunds. The Solvency II regime—apologies for the slightly technical language, but the Minister will appreciate it—that applies to insurers works off a one-year 99.5% confidence level, but over time the industry has been allowed to apply a number of important adjustments, including diversification, matching adjustments and deferred tax credits. All have had the effect of effectively reducing the capital requirement for insurers.”
House of Commons7 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“When we attempted —[Interruption.] I welcome the Pensions Minister back to his place and am grateful that he is here to listen to this. When we attempted to launch the pensions superfund, we were bombarded by people who wanted to strangle the superfund industry at birth: the Association of British Insurers; an extraordinary intervention by the Governor of the Bank of England—I am not sure whether the Minister has had a chance to reprogramme the Governor of the Bank of England recently, but I hope he is more enthusiastic about the Minister’s proposal than he was about the last Government’s—and lastly, the Pensions Regulator itself. I think the Minister wants to create a thriving market in superfunds.”
House of Commons7 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I regret that the Pensions Minister, the hon. Member for Swansea West (Torsten Bell), is no longer in his place; I wanted to pay him something of a compliment for getting the Bill here today with typical ambition and enthusiasm. I should, however, remind him of my grandmother’s favourite saying: an ounce of experience is worth a ton of enthusiasm. I stand here to talk about part 3 of the Bill on the basis of about four years’ experience as a director of the first pensions superfund, having attempted to get it through the Pensions Regulator and the interim regime put up under the last Government. That was ultimately unsuccessful; part of the reason why we are going to need the Pensions Minister’s enthusiasm and ambition is that he will come up against a series of vested interests.”
House of Commons7 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗