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Pensions Bill

I support the amendment along the lines of the views expressed by my noble friend Lady Greengross. We are all upset to know that this group of people has been severely disadvantaged. I know that many Pension Acts have been passed since I was on the board of Legal & General. I also sat on its pension fund and often asked why the company was taking a pension holiday. Now there are incentives for companies to do that in good times, and I am told that there might even have been penalties if the company had not done so. Anyone who reads the letters that have been sent to noble Lords on this subject will feel a sense of responsibility. It may be that none of the proposals in the amendments provides the perfect method for making appropriate compensation, and perhaps the answer is that such compensation should come from all the groups that have been mentioned, including those of us who will also lose out on our pensions in due course. Hundreds of letters have been received and they have all been individually written. They are not the sort of letters that one puts straight into the waste paper basket—the type of letter which someone writes out for you and which you send on. These are heartfelt letters from people who had imagined that they would have a reasonable retirement with not huge sums of money but enough to live on. The letter that upset me most was from a woman who felt that she had to lie to her husband on his deathbed by saying that she would be all right. She said that she had never lied to him in her life and feels sad that she had done so, but she lied so that he could die feeling that everything would be all right for her. We must find some way of doing the right thing by this group of people. It cannot be right that they are getting only 60 per cent of what was promised to them. The situation has been going on for a long time and many of them have died in the mean time. These may not be the right amendments but they convey the general feeling. At one stage, under the previous Government, we were all encouraged to move out of the state system and into the private sector, and a lot of the people whom we are talking about today became victims as a result of that. They were told that what they were doing would be more beneficial to them in the long run. However, things have not turned out that way, so I hope that we will think again.