Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Mike Freer and Jonathan Edwards

Thursday 21st October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mike Freer]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. As someone who has come from a financial services background, I have felt the regulator’s hand on my shoulder, so I do understand that regulation can be good, but equally our regulators need to be entirely in tune with our export policy. My colleagues in the Treasury who lead on regulation will be ensuring that our regulator works closely with our export strategy. Specifically, I refer my hon. Friend to some of the annexes particularly in our trade deal with Japan where the benefits of that work can already been seen.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (Ind)]

6. What recent discussions she has had with the Welsh Government on her Department’s ongoing trade negotiations.

Ford UK (Duty of Care to Visteon Pensioners)

Debate between Mike Freer and Jonathan Edwards

Tuesday 4th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[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.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate, and I also want to put on record my congratulations on the work done by the hon. Members for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe) and for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) in leading the all-party group on this subject. Is it not the fact that suspicions are deepened by Visteon suffering an operating loss for every year that it existed? It never made a profit and its total committed debts by the time it ceased to operate were $955 million.

[Mike Freer]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. A company being transferred away from its parent as a loss maker is, in itself, not the issue, but it is whether the management, on both sides of the spin-off, genuinely believed that the business recovery plan was viable. I shall go on to refer to a comment made by the then chief executive of Visteon about the viability of the business post spin-off. The comment suggests that they knew exactly what they were doing, and that this was simply an exercise of dumping a liability while cleaning up the main Ford balance sheet.