Equitable Life

Neale Hanvey Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (SNP)]

Campaigners have now been fighting for two decades for the compensation they are owed to cover pensions lost due to the collapse of Equitable Life and the UK Government’s administration of the pensions industry. My Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath constituents were first let down by their own then MP, one of my constituency predecessors, Mr Gordon Brown, when he served as Labour Chancellor and then Prime Minister. In 2010, as one of their first moves in office, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats promised that money would be forthcoming, but 10 years on, my constituents and up to 1 million more people across the UK are still waiting for that fair and transparent settlement they were promised.

Donald Scott, the east of Scotland regional representative of EMAG, represents dozens of local cases where people are having to work well into what should have been their well-earned retirement. Others have had to sell their homes because of the shortfall in their pensions. He described the Chadwick report as “discredited”, the financial offers made to date as “derisory” and rightly condemned the parliamentary ombudsman offer as a “pittance”. My constituents want to know: how can the Government condemn benefit cheats or abandon 3 million self-employed for fear of cheating, when Her Majesty’s Treasury continues to cheat the victims of its own maladministration?

The victims of this scandal have been cheated. According to Westminster Governments of every hue, they did the right thing and saved diligently for their retirement. The compensation offered to them amounts to 22%—often less—of the losses that they suffered. EMAG has identified cases of serious errors in the Treasury’s sums, such as calculating the loss of one pensioner at £58 who actually lost over £7,000, and another, which has already been mentioned, at £17 when the actual loss was over £8,500.

The party of Government agreed in 2010 to pay £1.5 billion in redress for this scandal, despite accounts estimating losses to be between £4 billion and £4.8 billion and EMAG claiming that the true figure of relative losses is probably in the order of £6 billion. It is no wonder then that nearly 1 million policyholders feel short-changed of their pension and of their retirement.

In 2005, Equitable Life victim Liz Kwantes was so angry at losing tens of thousands of pounds that she had saved to provide financial security in her retirement that she stood for election against Gordon Brown in his and now my home constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. She stood as an independent on that issue alone. While Mr Brown enjoys a gold-plated pension, she and so many others are still suffering because of the inaction of successive Westminster Governments. It cannot be difficult to imagine why this is causing some to question whether the delay is a cynical ploy to wait for those impacted on to die before receiving the compensation that they are due.

I can assure my constituents that they now have an MP who is firmly on their side, but, to date, that cannot be said of this Government. Last March, I was glad to be joined by 42 cross-party Members who signed my early-day motion, but that will be of little consequence until this Government honour their word and commit to increasing the available funding from £1.5 billion to the £4.1 billion required to cover the Treasury’s own calculation of the true costs of full compensation to all victims.