Equitable Life

John Glen Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (John Glen)]

It is a privilege to respond to the debate. First, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and the hon. Member for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton) on their tireless work on this issue, which has helped the Government to achieve so much. I attended a meeting of the all-party parliamentary group for justice for Equitable Life policyholders last September, and the respect of colleagues on both sides of the House for those Members’ work was clear.

This well-documented topic has been explored once again in detail today, with 10 eloquent and measured speeches by Members on both sides of the House. I need to declare an interest. My father worked in a glasshouse nursery all his life and paid in modest sums each month to Equitable Life. He received the compensation of 22.4% to a bond that he was paying into. Sadly, he died of mesothelioma aged 69, just two years ago. I know that it was a matter of grave concern for him, and he took the money and invested it somewhere else. I am very familiar with the long history of this case.

I want to take this opportunity to remind Members that, on this issue, this Government have taken more action than any previous one. Using the ombudsman’s findings, we determined the reduced returns that policyholders received to be £4.1 billion. That is significantly more than the £340 million arrived at by the previous Labour Government in the Chadwick review, which was then dismissed. That increase is because we generously assumed that every new investor consulted the incorrect regulatory returns and, on the sole basis of those returns, made an investment.

In 2010, we announced that up to £1.5 billion would be made available for payments. Those payments were tax-free, which increased their value even more. Out of that £1.5 billion, following representations from groups such as the Equitable Members Action Group, we decided to pay the group of with-profits annuitants in full. The total cost of those annual payments was estimated to be around £625 million. As several Members have mentioned, there is an additional £100 million contingency fund in place to provide for annuitants should they live longer than their actuarial forecast, and we expect the contingency to be drawn on from the middle of the next decade. The remaining funding was distributed pro rata to remaining eligible policyholders. The scheme operated successfully for around five years, and in 2016 the operation was wound down.

There has, reasonably, been a degree of repetition in the asks made today, and three key points were raised. I have listened closely to those representations, and I would like to deal with some of them in turn. First, I have received suggestions that all policyholder records should be retained indefinitely, in case further payments are made. There has been correspondence between the Treasury and the APPG on that matter, and I can assure Members that relevant records are currently retained and will continue to be as long as it is legal. I can reassure the House that there are no plans to destroy any records.

Secondly, I am aware that some are dissatisfied with the £1.5 billion and suggest that it is incompatible with the ombudsman’s report. However, Members will be aware that the ombudsman wrote to the APPG on that issue and said that the Government’s decisions could not be said to be incompatible with her report. That spending decision was taken in the wider context of other spending priorities. I recognise that there is a whole range of opinions about spending priorities. That is what we do—we make relative decisions. This decision needed to be fair to the taxpayer, who funded these payments, and £1.5 billion was, on balance, judged to be the most appropriate figure.

I want to be clear: when this settlement was made, it was not subject to future review by the Government. I note the inference by the APPG and Members from the statement at the time, but no specific commitment was made to return to that calculation. No obligation linked it to the future state of public finances. There have been representations that this issue should be reopened and that a further £2.6 billion should be paid to policyholders. The Government’s position on this is clear, and I have set it out in my letters to the APPG and my meeting with it last year. Being in government is about making difficult decisions. Our decision was to spend £1.5 billion, reversing and multiplying by four the previous Government’s dismissal of a commitment to £340 million. These difficult decisions are about how to be fair to both hard-working taxpayers and those in receipt of public spending and services, and where the need to spend public money is greatest.

I acknowledge the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) concerning the imperative to provide for the next generation and, as several Members said, to restore trust in pensions and pension savings. There is cross-party consensus on that, and both parties have worked hard to achieve a lot in terms of auto-enrolment. There is more work to be done in that space. None the less, the House will recognise that the opportunity cost to the Exchequer of paying a further £2.6 billion is funding the salaries of 67,000 teachers, or 112,000 new nurses.

[Gordon Marsden]

I am listening with some concern, as I am sure other Members are, to what appears to be an edging further and further away from the commitments that we have all asked for this afternoon. The Minister talks about priorities. We could spend three hours in this Chamber talking about the priorities that this Government have given to tax cuts and other things. He needs to choose his words carefully in responding to what has been said.

[John Glen]

I will choose my words carefully, but it is undeniable that after 13 years in government, the previous Labour Government—

[Gordon Marsden]

Stop playing party politics.

[John Glen]

It is not about party politics; it is about saying that when we came into government, in the absence of a resolution to this matter, we increased the figure from £340 million, which the last Labour Government were proposing, to more than £1.5 billion. In the light of those facts, it is a bit unreasonable to criticise what I am saying. While I appreciate and empathise with the fact that some policyholders who have invested their funds have not received the funds that they hoped for, like my late father, and that this impacted on their plans and futures, we have taken the best action that we could have to resolve the Government’s part in these reduced returns. We have done more than any previous Government.

I draw colleagues’ attention to Equitable Life’s own research from 2011, which suggested that their policyholders wanted the Government compensation to draw a line under this issue. I agree with them. The Government’s view is that this issue is now closed, and as a Minister I have never been in the business of offering false hope.