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Occupational Pensions

I usually feel sympathy for the monkey when it is clearly the organ grinder who has messed up. I would feel a great deal more sympathy for the Secretary of State if he had started out by expressing sympathy with those who had lost their pensions, and if he had then not behaved like a desiccated calculating machine and compounded his error by questioning the good faith of my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond). The Secretary of State knows that many people have lost out as a result of these problems, but even the £2.5 billion a year stolen by the Chancellor from pension schemes would be enough to pay for the losses that those people have suffered. Will the Secretary of State tell me why Government spokesmen were rubbishing the ombudsman’s report before it was published?