Equitable Life

Jessica Morden Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab) [V]]

I really do appreciate the opportunity to speak in this debate on behalf of the constituents who have contacted me over the years, having been victims of the Equitable Life scandal. As other Members have highlighted, almost 1 million pension savers have received back just 22% of the losses they suffered as a result of colossal maladministration. The Treasury has refused to disclose the full workings of the calculations behind the payments made to date, putting paid to the notion of a fair and transparent programme of compensation, which was promised to Equitable Life victims back in 2010.

The human impact of this scandal cannot be understated, and many of those affected by the collapse of Equitable Life are still bearing the costs of this injustice every day. As others have pointed out, Equitable Life victims are not individuals and families who can afford to write this scandal off as a kind of unfortunate administrative error. Typically, as the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) said, they are retired nurses, teachers, factory and shop workers, and small business owners with less than £20,000 in their pension pot. They put their hard-earned savings pension rights into what they understandably saw as an established, reputable and well-recognised provider, and they were badly let down.

My office has received harrowing accounts—others have said the same—from constituents in recent years, including, recently, from a woman writing on behalf of her husband, who is now 89 and living with dementia. He is one of many who lost thousands of pounds by putting the profits of his small business into an Equitable Life pension, as he was advised. Another constituent, one of the many who received only 22% of their losses, as calculated by the Treasury, describes it in painfully frank terms. He said:

“The amount I have lost would have enabled me and my family to enjoy more things such as holidays before I die.”

He added:

“I was amazed by the revelations that the successive governments had failed to regulate the Society properly. In such circumstances I expected government to ensure the losses sustained by policyholders were made good. I feel particularly incensed by the successive government administrations’ failure to accept the report and advice of their Parliamentary Ombudsman that policy holders should be put back in the position they would have been if the maladministration had not occurred. I am even more incensed by the excuses they have made over many years”.

That point about “many years” is worth emphasising. We are now 13 years on from the parliamentary ombudsman concluding that the victims’ loss was directly attributable to a decade of serious serial regulatory maladministration. We are 11 years on from Equitable Life victims being promised fair and transparent compensation and from the coalition Government accepting that the victims’ losses amounted to about £4.3 billion, before allocating only £1.5 billion for compensation. Many of those who were promised, who deserved and who indeed needed recompense are no longer with us, but the Government still owe it to those traced pension saver victims still with us to find a solution quickly. As one constituent put it to me, “It is a policy decision that is now delaying and preventing action.”

I urge the Prime Minister and the Chancellor to look carefully at the recommendations from the action group and the all-party parliamentary group as soon as possible. Every effort should be made to ensure that those who are owed compensation are identified and that the process of compensation is accurate and transparent. It is important that the Government, once and for all, get to the bottom of what happened, and we all look forward to the Public Accounts Committee and Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee responding to the proposal for a joint inquiry.