Speeches by Whately.

“I say to the Minister yet again that pension pots belong to the people who have worked, earned and saved. It is their money, not the Government’s. Ministers in Whitehall should not have the power to dictate what people’s pension savings are invested in. As Ronald Reagan once put it, the nine most terrifying words in th…”

“Mandation will not guarantee better returns, contrary to what the Minister continues to claim. It may force trustees to take decisions that are not in savers’ best interests—decisions driven not by judgment or duty but by direction. When fiduciary judgment is replaced with political instruction in this way, it does not…”

“Like last week’s amendments, the amendments before us today make the mandation power in the Bill less bad. They constrain it in terms of timing and scope, but they do not solve the problem, because the problem is not the percentage, the threshold or the duration of the power but the principle. If something is wrong in …”

“The Minister has also introduced an amendment to limit the Government to only exercising the mandation power once, giving them just one opportunity to set the asset-allocation requirement. I recognise that that gives more certainty to industry, as there is less risk of moving goal posts. He has also updated from last w…”

“Size alone does not equal success. Take football clubs as an example: a larger club may have greater resources, a bigger stadium, more expensive players and larger crowds, but none of that guarantees results on the pitch. I am told that one need look no further than Tottenham Hotspur to see that. We welcome the Governm…”

“As I think the right hon. Gentleman will have heard in my speech, there is widespread agreement that we want to see more investment by pension funds in the UK; the debate is about whether mandation is the way to achieve that. Actually the Minister’s main argument for the mandation powers is not about investment in the …”

“This week we have seen a flurry of concessions. There have been revisions to the sunset clause. First, the date when the mandation power lapses, if it has not been used, is being brought forward from 2035 to 2032. Secondly, the entire regime will be repealed at the end of 2035. So, as drafted, the mandation threat will…”

“Who knew that the Pension Schemes Bill would become so controversial? It is a Bill on which there was so much consensus; a Bill begun by one party in government and now being continued by another; a Bill that could have sailed through Parliament. But no, that was not to be, because the Government had an idea—a bad idea…”

“My hon. Friend is exactly right. Sometimes the Pensions Minister talks about this all as being technicalities, but the fact is that the Government are coming after people’s hard-earned savings, and the public can see it. The Government think it is a pension pot they can mess with. We know that it is people’s own saving…”

“The Minister mentioned that the water taskforce will be meeting with David Hinton, the chief executive of South East Water, to hold him to account for its abysmal performance in the recent outages. If that taskforce finds that South East Water’s response has been inadequate, as I believe it was, what action will the ta…”

“I thank the Minister very much for taking a second intervention from me. I do not disagree that the country needs more homes; that is an accepted fact. However, what we have seen under her Government is housing targets being shifted out of London, so that London’s numbers have fallen and the numbers in the constituency…”

“Will the Minister give way?”

“I commend my right hon. Friend on securing this debate and on the speech he is making about the challenge of supplying water to Tonbridge and Malling, now and in the future with such a huge number of developments planned. Given the difficulty of supplying water to his constituency, where there are 19,000 more homes pla…”

“I thank the Secretary of State for his statement, and for his communications with me. Juliette was a schoolgirl in year 13 at Queen Elizabeth grammar school in my constituency. She died of meningitis this weekend. Her headteacher said of her: “She was incredibly kind, thoughtful and intelligent”, and that she had been …”

“The Government have lost control of welfare. The benefits bill is ballooning. Sickness benefits alone will cost us £109 billion by the end of the decade. Working-age benefits are costing £161 billion right now and rising. But instead of bringing forward welfare savings, Labour MPs have chosen to spend ever more on bene…”

“The working-age benefits bill is set to reach £171 billion by the end of this Parliament, yet the Government are doing nothing to get it under control. In fact, by scrapping the two-child cap, they have added another £3 billion. It is time to stop spending and get saving. The Conservatives would stop benefits for forei…”

“Madam Deputy Speaker, you are no doubt familiar with the dramatic principle of Chekhov’s gun: if there is a gun on the wall in the first act, it will be fired by the final scene. Ministers say that the mandation power in the Pension Schemes Bill is merely a backstop that they do not intend to use, but once they have a …”

“Given that the savings of millions of people are at stake, I am disappointed that the Secretary of State did not rise to answer this important question. The Pensions Minister needs to stop conflating the voluntary Mansion House agreement with changing the law to give Government the power to direct pension fund investme…”

“I thank my hon. Friends for their contributions during the passage of this Bill. In particular, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith), who has argued with true passion against the Bill, drawing on her own experience as well as her sound principles. I also thank my hon. Friends the Membe…”

“My hon. Friend has made the important point that no other party in the Chamber seems to realise what a serious financial position the country is in. We have to ask ourselves hard questions about what the country can afford.”