Equitable Life

Matt Vickers Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Vickers (Stockton South) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) for the incredible campaign that he has been fighting for so many years to get justice for victims of a scandal that has caused so much pain to so many. We talk about numbers and sums of money, but this is about lives destroyed and dreams shattered—people who were responsible, and spent their lives saving for their and their families’ futures, only to have it stolen away from them. They say you cannot buy happiness and that money isn’t everything, but these are life-changing sums, years of work and saving, and there are huge impacts on people’s quality of life in later years.

I recently met a group of constituents who are affected by this issue. I was told that the last time they had met there had been many more of them, because for some of the victims who lived in my constituency it is already too late. They will never see their money; they will never know justice. One man shared his story with me. It is a story that I will never forget and one that he is happy for me to share with the House.

Tom Coulson was born in 1935 to a working-class family. The son of a furnaceman, he lived through the war and is a grafter; he worked hard and did the right thing, saving to provide for his family’s future. At 15, he got a job as an apprentice. At 28, after 10 years of night school, he qualified as a chartered mechanical engineer. At 39, he set up his own design and project management company, and began planning for his retirement at 60. At 56, his wife persuaded him to retire and put all the capital they could spare into an Equitable Life pension scheme. He is now 85 and life is not what he planned for, worked for, saved for, or deserves. Eighteen months ago his wife, Anne, was diagnosed with vascular dementia. She is wheelchair bound and living in a care home, reliant on funding from the local authority.

Tom has two assets. The first is his home. If he sells this, half will go to local authority assessment. He also has a joint life-assured investment plan, and any early withdrawal could see 50% taken into account by the local authority. Expenses on the upkeep of his home—and, for example, the £4,000 spent on skin cancer treatment last year—mean that he is now eating away at his working capital, promising future hardship, which could be prevented if the Government settled this obligation.

Tom’s losses would have been a life-changing amount over the years. If recovered now, those sums would make a huge difference to Anne and Tom’s life, allowing them to spend more time together, after 62 years of marriage. Mr and Mrs Coulson have lost a heartbreaking £264,000. I beg the Government to do justice: give these victims what they worked for, saved for, need and deserve.