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Equitable Life

I think that many people, including some of the hon. Gentleman's Back-Bench colleagues, share his frustration that no real progress is being made despite policyholders having suffered a cut in their policy values in 2001 and despite Penrose having said in 2004 that regulation was a contributory factor to the problems at Equitable Life. We need to see some progress. The reality is that the Government simply did not want to lift a finger to help those who had lost out because of the regulation of Equitable Life. They sought to block the second inquiry and they tried to deny that the ombudsman had the power to investigate the Government Actuary. When that tactic failed, they sought to frustrate the ombudsman with a barrage of documents and legal arguments, and when all that failed, there was delay. It is no wonder that we are not making the progress that the hon. Gentleman and many other hon. Members want. Even when the Government published their response to the ombudsman's report, their first act, after apologising for failing policyholders, was to reject a number of the ombudsman's findings of maladministration. Perhaps, they had spent that six months of delay trying to wriggle out of their responsibilities to policyholders and finding loopholes to evade the course for justice. Of course, they were challenged by EMAG, and the High Court partially overturned the Government's rejection of some of the ombudsman's findings—another delaying tactic. The Government's response triggered a further delay, with the commissioning of Sir John Chadwick to advise on a number of areas such as calculating relative loss and establishing which groups of policyholders suffered disproportionate loss and what proportion of the losses could be apportioned to other bodies. Hon. Members will know that Sir John published his third interim report last week and that he expects to publish his final report in May. That is quite convenient is it not? There will be no formal response from the Government before the general election, no commitments and no guarantees. Last month, at the meeting of the all-party group on Equitable Life Policy Holders, the Chief Secretary gave some hints of what he might do if the Government were re-elected, but there was no commitment to a clear timetable for making payments. There was no indication of when policyholders might see justice delivered or when they would know for certain just how much money, if any, they would receive from the Government. There were lots of hints but nothing specific—just like in their amendment today.