Equitable Life

Tim Farron Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD) [V]]

So here we are again. First, I would like to endorse the calls for an inquiry on some of the wildly inaccurate payments received by Equitable Life pensioners. That transparency is needed by those who are dependent on what they get through the Equitable Life scheme run by the Government for any kind of income in retirement. That is so important.

This is a reminder of how Governments of various colours have let these people down. It is clear to me that the Government, in their failure to regulate Equitable Life, allowed people a false sense of security when investing and doing what Governments of all shapes, sizes and political hues had encouraged them to do: provide for their own retirement. Those people then discovered, to their horror, that their plans for retirement—often modest plans—had been destroyed.

The Government’s first response was to provide about half a million pounds of support. I am proud that my colleague Vince Cable was instrumental in ensuring that an additional £1 billion was provided in 2010, but even that is far short of the £4.5 billion that the independent ombudsman recognised was owed to the people who have been so cruelly hit by the Equitable Life crisis. People who have been encouraged to save and provide for themselves and their families in retirement, and who then dutifully take that advice, should not be punished and left to a retirement in penury because the Government of the day did not do their job in regulating Equitable Life properly.

In my community alone, 2,000 victims of the Equitable Life scandal are making the best they can of a reduced circumstances retirement. It seems to me that the Treasury is callously banking on the number of people in receipt and deserving of compensation reducing year on year. That is a tragedy, and the Government should step up right now. It is not only a historical injustice to the 2,000 people in my community who are Equitable Life pensioners that they have not been given their due payments and the retirement that they had saved and provided for. It is also damaging to our communities. Let us remember that if those 2,000 people in Westmorland and Lonsdale were to receive the payments they were due by this Government, it would make a big difference to our local economy. Morally and practically, it is right for this Government to do what the independent ombudsman called for some years ago and pay the full £4.5 billion to those pensioners.