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Equitable Life

I hope that the hon. Gentleman will listen carefully to my speech because it will include many of the points that he has rightly raised. I hope that he will be satisfied that I am pressing for the same things. Equitable Life was founded in 1762 as a mutual insurance company, based on the ideas of Charles Dodson, a fellow of the Royal Society and a man well ahead of his time. It started selling pensions as early as 1913, but it was not until 1957 that the society started selling its infamous guaranteed annuity rate pensions, which gave a clear and unambiguous return on capital invested, depending on the age at which the policyholder decided to start taking the annuity. That carried on until 1988, when the society realised that its rates were so good and so far ahead of the rest of the market that they were unsustainable. In December 2000, Equitable Life was forced to close to new business. By that time, it had more than 1.5 million members. That is why so many hon. Members have so many constituents who have suffered. The introduction to the December 2008 Public Administration Committee report stated:""Over the last eight years many of those members and their families have suffered great anxiety as policy values were cut and pension payments reduced. Many are no longer alive, and will be unable to benefit personally from any compensation. We share both a deep sense of frustration and continuing outrage that the situation has remained unresolved for so long."" Last month, on 5 May, frustrated that little had happened since her long-awaited initial report in July 2008, the parliamentary ombudsman, Ann Abraham, published a second report, "Injustice unremedied: the Government's response on Equitable Life". It was scathing about the inaction on her initial recommendations of July 2008:""I was deeply disappointed that the Government chose to reject many of the findings that I had made, when I was acting independently on behalf of Parliament and after a detailed and exhaustive investigation.""