Equitable Life Policyholders: Compensation

Debate between James Heappey and Kirsten Oswald

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Kirsten Oswald]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. We should commend those people for all their continued work in keeping the issue at the forefront of our minds.

A cynical person might wonder whether—as with the collapse of the Connaught Income Fund, which was mentioned by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry)—there is a strategy of dragging action out for an extraordinarily long time to ensure that fewer of those affected are still with us. It is simply not good enough for this sorry saga to continue for even longer. The UK Government must now finally deal fully with the outstanding injustices experienced by these unfortunate policyholders.

We really do need to grasp the nettle, and acknowledge the wrong that has been done and the impact that it has had on people’s lives. It is essential for action to be taken on behalf of the people who have lost out, but we also need to ensure that they can maintain confidence in our pension provision and in financial and regulatory bodies.

[James Heappey (Wells) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making some powerful points on behalf of her constituents. Many of my constituents have also been in touch to say that they see this as such an unfairness because they did the right thing. They worked all their lives, and they paid into a scheme that they thought was the right one. That sense of unfairness is compounded by the way in which so many other schemes that have failed have been dealt with. Banks have been bailed out by the Government, and policyholders have been refunded. Does the hon. Lady agree that the grievance of these policyholders is perhaps all the more because so many other organisations have already been bailed out?

[Kirsten Oswald]

The point is well made. I think that Equitable Life policyholders, like Connaught Income Fund investors, feel particularly hard done by, and that is perfectly understandable. We need to deal with the compensation, and that can only happen when we have fully quantified the loss by negotiating the sums involved. At present, we are simply not there. After all this time, the Government need to acknowledge and deal with the injustice that people understandably feel. They have worked hard, and they have saved hard. They have done all the things that Governments emphasise are financially responsible and the way to guarantee security in retirement. Imagine how they must have felt when not only did their hard-earned money vanish, but the Government failed to protect them and then, to compound the problems further, failed to offer fair compensation.

Of course I recognise that there has been some compensation, but those affected understandably feel that that is not good enough and that it is not right for them to lose out because the Government claim that there are financial constraints. Why should they pay the price for failures of Treasury regulation in the 1990s? The Government must realise how much damage scandals such as this cause to public confidence in saving and in regulation. Surely, as the hon. Member for Harrow East said, righting wrongs like those suffered by Equitable Life and, indeed, Connaught investors is part of the way to restore that confidence.

There is real confusion, much of it arising from inaccurate communication from the Department for Work and Pensions, about the national insurance contributions that are needed for the new state pension. As we have heard from a number of Members today, WASPI women are marching on Parliament because the UK Government have whipped the pension rug from under their feet. Here, the saga of the Equitable Life policyholders drags on and on, and their pension provision has also vanished into the ether. If the Government are at all serious about pensions and about people saving for their future, they must listen and they must act now, finally, to deal with the Equitable Life scandal once and for all.