Business of the House

Andrew Western Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

I am sorry to hear about that situation, and I will raise it with the Home Office. From my own experience, the Home Secretary’s Parliamentary Private Secretary has been very diligent in making sure that Members on all sides of this House are kept informed about things that are going on in their constituencies, so I am sure that if there has been a delay in sending a letter to the hon. Gentleman, it will have been an error. However, I will make sure the Minister and the Department have heard his point.

[Andrew Western (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I associate myself with the comments that have been made about my friend and predecessor as Member for Stretford, Sir Tony Lloyd. I will reserve my comments for the appropriate time in the forthcoming weeks, but in light of the comments made by the shadow Leader of the House, I wanted to express my solidarity with her in having experienced unfavourable comparisons with Tony. She is more fortunate than I am; she had those comparisons for only the first couple of years, but I continue to experience them some 27 years after he ceased to represent Stretford.

My constituent Colin is a retired senior police officer awaiting pension adjustment under the McCloud remedy. He and many others have made important life decisions on the basis of a promise made by XPS, the Government’s pension administrators for the scheme, to remediate all retirees by July this year. Without notification—with a website update alone—XPS has now pushed that date back to November this year. Colin and thousands of others have made life-changing decisions on the back of information previously provided, and years’ worth of hard-earned pension are still outstanding, yet I understand that, to date, not a single retiree has been remediated, or one letter been sent to any recipient. Could we have a statement from the Policing Minister on the progress that XPS is making on the remediation of affected police pensions, and the steps the Government are taking to assure themselves that the legal deadline for adjusting those pensions will be met?

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. As the date of the next Home Office questions has not been tabled, I will write to and make sure the relevant Minister has heard the hon. Gentleman’s request.