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Occupational Pensions

We cannot rewrite history in retrospect in order to make it convenient for the present, when it was never true for the past. I have yet to find anyone involved in setting up those schemes who believed that all they were getting was a 50 per cent. chance of getting their money back. If Governments had said that to people, the contributors would have asked for the right either to get into another scheme or to bet their money on the horses at such odds themselves. That was not the guarantee that people believed they were getting as part of the post-Maxwell protection. I shall briefly move on to the question whether that means that the Government must pay compensation. As various hon. Members have said, the Government could use a number of mechanisms to try to make good the entirety of the provision, so they do not have to step in and take full responsibility. In order to understand why pensioners whose pensions have been stolen are so aggrieved about the nature of the current debate, we need to be clear that the financial assistance scheme does not remotely cover that provision, and that the numbers do not stack up against the losses. Although the Government claim that a total of £2 billion is being put forward to help 40,000 people, in truth the figures are somewhat different. A little more than £540 million has been committed over 50 years, which is about £12 million a year. The briefing issued by the Department for Work and Pensions before this debate points out that £1.5 million has been paid out since 2005 to about 450 people. That is a long way short of being a measure that deals with the stolen pensions of 120,000 or 125,000 people.