Equitable Life

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab) [V]]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) on securing this debate and his many years of campaigning alongside the members of the Equitable Members Action Group and the APPG on justice for equitable life policyholders.

The Equitable Life scandal has deeply affected hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country and the lives of many of my constituents in Putney, Roehampton and Southfields. As has been said, these people are not rich; they are typically hard-working retired nurses, teachers, civil servants and factory and shop workers. The majority of them had less than £20,000 in their pension pot, so the scandal has affected them deeply.

The scandal has rumbled on for decades without satisfactory conclusion. When the Equitable Life Assurance Society closed to new business in 2000, it left its 1 million policyholders with pensions that were worth far less than they had been told, resulting in significant suffering and financial losses. Many of the affected pensioners are elderly, and many have died or will die without ever having received adequate compensation, so the time for action is now.

One constituent of mine wrote to me in despair at how she had received only a quarter of her pension and was worried that, at 91 years old, there was not much time left for justice to be done for people like her. Last week, I met affected constituents, who said that they had invested in good faith—they had trusted and Equitable Life and the regulatory system, but have lost money that they need now more than ever.

Following investigations of the scandal, the parliamentary ombudsman ruled that the losses were directly attributable to a decade of regulatory maladministration, including by the Government Actuary’s Department in the Treasury. In 2010, the coalition Government accepted the ombudsman’s recommendations in full and announced the creation of the £1.5 billion scheme to pay compensation to Equitable Life policyholders. However, given that the losses were £4.3 billion, that amounted to just 22.4% of the losses of the 895,000 traced pension savers. All those victims should be repaid.

I know that money is tight at the moment, but that cannot be an excuse for not paying. As one of my constituents pointed out, the tax Department would not accept him saying, “Sorry, I can’t pay my taxes—it is too expensive,” but that is, in essence, what people feel the Treasury is telling them. There were errors in judgment in existing payments and, as has been said, all the appeals in that respect have been upheld, so it is time for a joint inquiry into the errors in payments.

Now is the time to settle this debt and right this wrong. We may be living in an economically tumultuous period, but the current crisis has shown us that money can be found when the political will exists. It has also shown us the value of stimulating the economy by putting money directly into people’s pockets when they need it the most. As one of my constituents said, “If you find something that is wrong, you should rectify it. This has undermined the whole system. Why would I tell my children to invest in pension schemes when this can just happen again?”

The Government owe it to the victims of the Equitable Life scandal in Putney and across the country to get this right, to fulfil the Government’s promises, and to compensate the victims at long last.