Ford UK (Duty of Care to Visteon Pensioners)

Debate between Mike Freer and John Baron

Tuesday 4th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mike Freer]

My hon. Friend makes another good point. We have seen over the years that when companies are seeking to renege on their pension responsibilities, they seek to delay through the courts. I suspect that many companies hope that the pensioners will die before the case is heard, and I agree that it is time that Ford met its responsibilities.

I return to the issue of Visteon being set up to fail. The Visteon UK pension plan was created 12 months after the spin-off from Ford, with a transfer value of just £230 million. That transfer value left an immediate deficit of £49 million. That deficit was not communicated to the employees. It looks as though Ford was simply shunting off its liabilities and cleaning up its main balance sheet. It could be argued that a viable spin-off company could have traded its way out, and that it could have made employee and employer contributions to rectify the deficit. Could Visteon have traded its pension fund out of trouble? Possibly—I am not an actuary, so I cannot comment.

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Ford certainly needs to answer key questions, and this will be the subject of a court case. However, we have invited other players in this sad affair, such as the Visteon management and the trustees at the time—key players when it came to the transfer—to come and meet us as a group, and they have refused. Does my hon. Friend agree that that should be considered as a negative on their part?

[Mike Freer]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I do not see why the former management and trustees should not come and talk to us and explain why they believed that the actions they took were correct. If they feel those actions were right, they should come and defend them. I also correct him, because although I thank him for his congratulations on securing the debate, the true congratulations should go to our hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe), who has been diligent and persistent in pursuing this case on behalf of Visteon pensioners. We should give credit where credit is due in this House.

To return to whether Visteon could be a going concern and therefore trade its way out of pension deficit, in the month before Visteon was spun off, documents submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission identified significant risks, but those risks were not communicated to the employees. Ford said that it was committed to ensuring Visteon’s viability by using Visteon to supply its products. Fair enough, but Ford then implemented a unilateral price reduction and started sourcing products from newer and cheaper alternative providers.

The European works agreement, apparently, was supposed to have transferred all the benefits, but it also tied Visteon into the UK wages and benefits that the employees were entitled to. Although we can argue that the benefits of the pension scheme have not been transferred, Visteon was, of course, saddled with the legacy labour and overhead costs, and, as I have mentioned, Ford then unilaterally dropped the prices it was willing to pay. The cost base of the spin-off remained high, but Visteon’s income was cut at a stroke by Ford.