Treasury and Work and Pensions

Listening to the exchanges earlier, I could not help wondering what my constituents would make of them if they were listening. I was thinking in particular of two groups of my constituents: those who have been affected by the collapse of Farepak—I have at least 200 families in that position—and those who have seen their occupational pensions disappear in recent years and are looking for help to remedy that. I do not think that they would have been much cheered by some of the scenes that we saw earlier. It was difficult to be impressed by the shadow Chancellor, who gave a characteristically public school debating speech. He is not here, but my advice to him would be to adopt a rather different tone if he wants to be taken entirely seriously. He deserved the clunking demolition that the Chancellor delivered to him. The Chancellor has said on a previous occasion that Farepak is a national disaster, and it is, in a variety of ways. It has also prompted all those who have been affected by the collapse of their occupational pensions to write. They say that although it is good that we are all getting exercised by Farepak, giving a day’s salary and participating in other campaigns to help the customers, and rightly so, what are we doing to help the tens of thousands of people who have lost all their occupational pensions through no fault of their own? My answer is that we should help both groups of people; they are not alternatives. They expect the Government to do what they can to remedy the failings of the market.