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Equitable Life (Payments) Bill

Like many other Members who have spoken this evening, I welcome the Bill. It is timely—it has certainly not come before time—and I congratulate the Financial Secretary on introducing it so early in the life of this Government. I too signed the EMAG pledge to stand up for fair and appropriate compensation, and like many other Members, I too have had many individuals in my constituency come to me in a terrible state because of what has happened to their pensions and their future as a consequence of maladministration and regulatory failure. For each one of those individuals that is a tragedy, but when we consider that 1 million policyholders and 1.5 million policies are involved, we see that it is not a tragedy; it is a national catastrophe, because it hits saving. We have now come out of one of the worst recessions in modern times—one of the worst since the second world war—and one of the things we must now do as a nation is get back into the habit of saving. Nothing in the previous Government's approach to the Equitable Life saga has done anything to encourage that habit. I have sat through most of today's debate and I have been disappointed and slightly irritated by the synthetic anger from Labour Members—I felt that particularly at the beginning of the debate. They have suggested that in some way we have been responsible for the delays and for the fact that these payouts are not happening more quickly, but we know of the previous Government's attitude and approach to Penrose, of how they obfuscated on the second parliamentary ombudsman's report and of the, in my opinion, cynical way in which they set up Chadwick to report after the general election so that it would be us who would be standing in this Chamber addressing these issues as we are today.