Mr. Jerry Moriarty:

Exactly. I am not a lawyer, but when all those changes took place and there were no issues, I could not see why that was the case. I touched on the forced wind up before it comes into effect. As I said, this legislation has been discussed for the last two years, and there are other similar Bills. There has been no experience of a rush to close schemes in that time. I think that there have been a lot of opportunities for schemes, particularly when there were a lot of funding issues in the middle of an economic crisis. If there was ever a time for a company to wind up a defined benefit scheme, that would have been it. I think there is still a lot of employer goodwill towards defined benefit schemes, and a lot of the restructuring that has been done happened in conjunction with trade unions. People have sat down together and reached solutions, so again, if that was going to happen we would have been seeing evidence of that over the last two years, and there certainly has been none of that.

Regarding the issue of putting employers at a competitive disadvantage, employers already have to account for defined benefit schemes within their balance sheets, so I am not sure that putting a contingent debt on the employers, from a balance sheet perspective, is going to make any significant difference for most employers. It is already there, and is already accounted for in their books, so again, I do not see that as a huge problem. As this is a contingent liability, it is only triggered, and only comes into effect, if the employer is trying to wind up a scheme that is not fully funded. From an accounting perspective, it is not a real debt, and it is already in the balance sheet in some form anyway.