Pensions Bill

The Government have great sympathy with all pensioners who lost out in very unfortunate circumstances. That is why we are committing some £8 billion of taxpayers' money to seek to address the issue. The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, referred to correspondence that she has received. It is incumbent on us all to think of those situations when we address this problem. Having said that, I think that it is a bit rich of the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, to try to get political capital out of the issue. The Conservative Party was criticised by the ombudsman. The ombudsman's report spanned 10 years from 1995, when the Tories introduced the minimum funding requirement, to which my noble friend Lady Hollis referred, in the Pensions Act 1995, in the wake of the Maxwell pensions scandal. Of course, William Hague, who is now shadow Foreign Secretary, was the Pensions Minister dealing with that matter. We should put these party-political scoring points behind us so that we can address the issue seriously.