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Summer Recess Adjournment

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Chorley (Mr. Hoyle). He raised a range of issues. The last of them was the fuel duty, which is extremely important in rural areas, and I echo his message to the Government to listen on that. The hon. Gentleman also mentioned Equitable Life. We have had an oral statement from a Minister in response to an urgent question. The hon. Member for Chorley said he did not like the question. I thought the question was very good, but the answers were somewhat lacking. If we are going to have an ombudsman service and if we want to encourage people to save, when the ombudsman highlights maladministration and a remedy is identified, the Government should look very carefully at that remedy, because if people are going to invest in future, they will need to have confidence that there will be proper regulation. The Government want to encourage greater saving, but that will not happen if regulators fail and then there is no compensation. People are not going to be encouraged to save if we do not have a system that gives them confidence that when things go wrong there will be compensation.