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Equitable Life

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point, and it is incumbent on whichever Government happen to be in office when such wrongs are exposed to respond fairly and reasonably, and that responsibility lies fairly and squarely with this Government. The ombudsman's report was absolutely damning. It said that the Government and regulators were guilty of regulatory failure and recommended that an independent tribunal quickly and simply calculate compensation. The Government slowly accepted, and apologised for, maladministration, but they initially rejected many of the ombudsman's findings, failed to offer immediate compensation and failed to set up the fully independent process that the ombudsman had asked for. That refusal was not only an injustice to Equitable Life policyholders, but a potential threat to the whole credibility of the ombudsman system. On many aspects of casework, many hon. Members might share my frustration that the ombudsman's reports are often not properly acted on, and I am afraid that the response of the Government at the time and, to be honest, since then has helped to undermine the credibility of the ombudsman system. That is potentially serious, particularly in respect of the Chadwick process, which we now have instead, because there is now a real question about whether it will resolve the issues at all. I am disturbed by the wording in the press release from Sir John Chadwick's office on 4 March. It accompanied his third and final interim report and noted his provisional views as to what factors the Government""may wish to take into account when considering which policyholders have experienced disproportionate impact."" In other words, the report will be only a polite suggestion to the Government about what they might do, and it will leave them scope for what might be regarded as a wider and remaining injustice, which those representing policyholders might easily reject. If we have only those tentative suggestions, we face the awful prospect, 16 or 17 years after the first warning signs, of still no resolution for about 40,000 Equitable Life pensioners, whose average age is, as the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) said, 79. Certainly, many of them are elderly and many have sadly died while waiting for compensation, and, as I said in an intervention, it is estimated that as many as 2,500 could die in the next 12 months without ever having received compensation. Policyholders were told to expect a final report from Sir John Chadwick in spring 2010. Well, the daffodils are out and my personal benchmark of spring, the Cheltenham gold cup, is imminent—the Cheltenham festival has started—but there is still no report. The real shame, as many Members have pointed out, is that in the end it will be a post-election report, and that adds to fears that the report will be controversial; that it might, as my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) pointed out, use over-pessimistic assumptions and that, in the end, it will be highly contentious.