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Equitable Life

All I will say to the hon. Gentleman is that we want to see policyholders compensated quickly and fairly. We all need to bear that in mind when thinking about how the process might develop. By next spring, so much work might have been done by Sir John Chadwick that setting up a tribunal could delay justice still longer. We need to be really careful and to think this through to ensure that we get the right outcome for policyholders, who are waiting anxiously for some resolution of the issue. Sadly, as every day goes by, more policyholders die. I wonder whether they would thank us for further delaying the process. Let me raise a couple of broader issues that we need to address. As my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) said in an intervention, the whole episode has brought into question the way in which the Government approach the ombudsman’s work. At times, it has appeared that the ombudsman is an inconvenience and an irritant, whose work should be treated as a distraction. We must remember that the ombudsman is an Officer of the House, and the way in which the Government have dealt with her undermines an office of the House and is disrespectful to it. The fact that the ombudsman has had to issue a further report on Equitable Life is a sign of how frustrated she has been on the matter. In evidence to the Public Administration Committee, the ombudsman said that""the Government’s response was ‘strong on assertion, short on facts’, and that it ‘fails to address the basis on which [she] came to several of [her] findings’. As she put it…Perhaps another way of saying that is the response says that I said something different to what I actually said and then says it disagrees with something I did not say"." I do not think that that is a very good position for an Officer of the House to find herself in. The Committee reported:""The fact that the Ombudsman feels that she has been misunderstood and misrepresented is an indictment of the quality of the Government’s arguments as presented to the public."" We should acknowledge that the Chief Secretary has sought to redress that by recognising that the ombudsman’s work has been undermined and that it should be celebrated more, but of course, what he needs to remember is that as MPs, we rely on the ombudsman to investigate claims of maladministration. To treat the ombudsman in such a way is to undermine the office and erode our constituents’ confidence in the mechanisms that Parliament has set up to protect and help them. I mentioned regulation and compensation in an intervention. The handling of Equitable Life, from start to finish, has undermined people’s confidence in the regulatory system. The way in which the Government have sought to block the ombudsman’s investigation into Equitable Life undermines confidence in the regulatory system. People want to know that the mechanism that is in place to protect them works and is respected, but the fact that the Government have sought to frustrate the ombudsman’s inquiry undermines people’s confidence that that mechanism is working. Therefore, we need to think very carefully about the relationship between Parliament and the ombudsman and what lessons we should learn from the process.