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Equitable Life

I am glad that the judicial review has been raised, and I agree with my hon. Friend. I do not want to repeat the comments about the judicial review made by my distinguished neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable), in his opening speech, because he summed up most of the situation extremely effectively. However, I want to point to one issue raised on the Floor: the presumption that somehow there is some resistance to the principle of compensating for regulatory maladministration. Comments were made by the judges on precisely that issue. We should pay attention to such comments when they come from such a distinguished source. They said that they""found no evidentiary support, at least in the material before us, for the claim…that Parliament ‘has accepted’ that compensation for regulatory failure is ‘not generally appropriate’"." These are judges. They understand how to read legislation and Hansard, and they did not think that this House had set up a barrier, or raised some principle, against compensating for regulatory maladministration. I understand the judges words to mean that we might strongly presume that the House expects regulatory maladministration—as others have said, we are not talking about market or management failure at Equitable Life—by the regulator to lead to some form of compensation, or the expectation of it. I do not want to take up the time of the House by talking about my many individual cases, but it is important to make it clear again—this has come up in previous debates—on the Floor of the House that people impacted by maladministration do not form a select group of highly paid, wealthy professionals who happened to engage in exotic life policies. Those who have been impacted in my community range across the social scale. Some are on very low and meagre incomes; others are on decent incomes. However, the notion that this is a case of the rich coming with a cry of heart is completely false, yet often that belief seems to underpin much of the thinking of those on the Treasury Bench. I want to make a plea that I have made before on the Floor of the House: we should be able to hold such a debate in Government time. We have heard that from others, but we all ought to make it clear that this is our expectation. Many people will resist supporting a motion tabled by an Opposition party, particularly on one of its Opposition days, merely on the principle that that is what is done. That is unfortunate, because an issue like this, given the suffering that has been caused, overrides any such facile view of how Parliament should function. The Government keep challenging us, over and over again, on our position on this issue, but surely this is exactly the kind of instance in which the Government should be introducing the debate, presenting it to the House and allowing the House the final word. We live in a parliamentary democracy, and surely we must fight for that principle, as well as the principle of justice—real justice—for our constituents. I want to make one last remark on Sir John Chadwick. I have great respect for him, but he has been very resistant to meeting the all-party group on Equitable Life policyholders, of which I happen to be the secretary. I find that unfortunate and I take it to mean that the debate that he is conducting is far less well informed than it should be. I ask the House to call again on Sir John Chadwick to rethink his interest in excluding Members of Parliament from considering these issues.