Equitable Life (Payments) Bill

Debate between Lord Tyrie and Gareth Thomas

Tuesday 14th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Thomas]

I think that the hon. Gentleman should have been listening to my earlier remarks, but I recognise the difficulty that he has, along with that of many of his constituents. He marched his constituents up the hill, promising them great sums of money in compensation, and it is now becoming clear that his Front Benchers will not deliver on that commitment. The hon. Gentleman should start to put a bit of pressure on his colleagues. Perhaps he will join us in supporting the amendments we will seek to table to improve the Bill further.

[Mr Tyrie]

Will the hon. Gentleman say how much more than Chadwick proposed that policyholders would have had any chance of getting had Labour won the last general election?

[Mr Thomas]

I say gently to the hon. Gentleman that rather than looking back, we need to look forward. The hon. Gentleman, who serves as Chair of the Select Committee on the Treasury, will, I hope, work with his hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee on Public Administration to hold those on his Front Bench to account.

Even though Lord Penrose concluded that regulatory system failures were secondary to the society’s own behaviour as a cause of its problems, the last Government, rightly in my view, recognised that many policyholders had been disproportionately affected. The ombudsman suggested a scheme with a case-by-case review that considered 30 million investment decisions by 1.5 million people, but that would have taken an estimated 4,000 staff years to resolve. That is the scheme to which the Conservative party committed in its manifesto. Case-by-case comparison for policyholders was not something that we thought was practicable.

Sir John Chadwick has proposed a simpler arrangement. If Government Members are now accepting the fundamentals of Sir John’s approach, they should at least be honest with the ombudsman and, crucially, with the hundreds of members of the Equitable Members Action Group and with this House. Is it not the truth that the parties on the Government Benches knowingly allowed members of EMAG to believe that they were opposed to Sir John Chadwick’s work and that they wanted a far greater sum to be available for compensation? In reality, yet another manifesto commitment is being ignored and yet another group of electors is having to come to terms with the fact that, despite what they were led to believe that Government Members wanted, their Front Benchers now have no commitment to the original pledge and no intention of following it through.