News: 05/04/2012 - Mark Hoban's silence

On 23rd December the Executive of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) wrote to Mark Hoban seeking for him to reconsider and include the pre–1992 with profits annuitants. As of the end of March they had not received any reply. Read the letter.

The excuses for exclusion that have been given are many and varied. It started with ‘They were outwith the Scheme because they'd signed an irreversible pension contract before they could have possibly known about any maladministration’. Why should that exclude them from the PO's recommendation to dispense ‘natural justice’ not ‘black letter law’? Next came: ‘They we over–bonused and actually benefitted from the maladministration’. Then there was the calculation, using Sir John Chadwick's hypothetical creation of ‘Reconstructed Equitable Life (REL)’ which when applied (but only up to the year 2001 — not to the year 2009 applied to those eligible) also showed the pre–1992s apparently had not lost. These weasels were comprehensively demolished by the definitive study by independent actuary David Forfar in September, which proved incontrovertibly that the pre–1992s have truly suffered EXACTLY the same losses in the years since 2002 as those 37,000 with profits annuitants deemed eligible.

Then Mark Hoban tried to get away with saying that the exclusion was down to the PO. But more and more MPs have read and understood that the PO herself put in writing twice in 2009 that she intended that the pre–1992s should be included because they suffered the same consequences of maladministration.

Now Mark Hoban is falling back on: ‘MPs voted for their exclusion at the third reading on 10th November, 2010.’ Whilst technically true, MPs simply didn't understand that they were voting down an amendment for the inclusion of pre–1992s when they had been led to believe by the whips that they were voting for the compensation payment scheme. That went through on the nod one hour later. It's hard to believe a minister of the Crown could sink to such depths to deny justice to the oldest and frailest.