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Equitable Life

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point. It allows me to say that work is well in hand. Sir John has already set out his approach and he is already a long way through the work. It is worth the House reflecting on the scale of the task that Sir John is working through. He has to consider information on 2 million policies and information dating back to around 1990 on payments and investments for over 20 main types of policy. That demands a review of several hundred specific policy products. It requires that data are checked by both his actuaries and those of Equitable Life. Sir John then has to give advice on how to assess the relative losses of the varied classes of policyholder. The only way to do this is to assess of the performance of the rest of the industry at the time, a process that will demand some pretty difficult actuarial calculations and the testing of a number of assumptions, not least how to most easily make payments and what their tax treatment should be. We have asked Sir John to finalise the design of his scheme by spring 2010.