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Equitable Life

I shall try to avoid the more party political comments made by some contributors to the debate, partly because the Equitable Life issue is one of simple justice, not of ideology or of party, and partly because many of the mistakes relating to Equitable Life and the regulatory regime that governed it predate this Government, which underlines the time that many policyholders have been waiting for a resolution to the issue. Many Members have referred to the 10 years since the Court of Appeal judgment and since Equitable closed its doors to new business, but six years before that Equitable Life started cutting the size of final bonuses, and by what should have been the turning point, the parliamentary ombudsman's report in 2008, the crisis had been brewing for about 14 years. Policyholders have therefore had to wait an enormous length of time.