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Occupational Pensions

I am coming to that. In many instances, private companies behaved appallingly to their employees. Tomorrow we will discuss the way in which compensation can be given to employees who, through bad luck, found themselves in insolvent schemes, but in many other instances solvent schemes were closed in a very cynical and manipulative way. A substantial number of my constituents belonged to the pension funds of two American companies, EMC and Parsons, both of which do large amounts of business with the Government. They are flourishing and highly profitable multinationals, whose offices can be seen by those driving out to Heathrow airport. A few years ago they took advantage of the existing arrangements to close their occupational pension funds to new entrants, and effectively to wipe out their obligations to existing pensioners. They did that within the law, but quite cynically. They shipped into the United Kingdom trustees who had been appointed at head office in the United States, and used the maximum scope that they had within the legislation to—““defraud? would be putting it too heavily—reduce the benefits of their employees substantially in a very cynical way, for which they had absolutely no justification in terms of their position. Employers of that sort have contributed to the lack of confidence in occupational pension schemes.