Finance Bill

My hon. Friend is right. There are strong links between his constituency and mine, forged not least by Stan Cullis—I have an office in Stan Cullis House. Pension schemes were getting into difficulty before 1997, most notably in the Maxwell case, when the remedies put forward were not the same. As for the reasons for pension funds’ difficulties, one of the legacies that built up to 1997 and onwards was that of underfunding, and contribution holidays taken by greedy employers. The extent of that underfunding started to emerge only when the Labour Government insisted on FRS 17, to try to get pension funds to indicate whether they were solvent. Some of them had been hiding the situation for years. It was like pyramid sales: they had been taking contribution holidays, building up deficits in the scheme and not telling anyone about them. We often hear about such cases in this place. I understand the ebb and flow of politics. When a Government change a regime so that there is greater transparency, they can catch a political cold for disclosing something that has been building up for years. Parenthetically, I say that we had the same difficulty with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in hospitals, about which the Conservative Government did almost nothing for 18 years. They would not publish the figures, but we did. That transparency meant that our constituents became aware of the widespread difficulty with MRSA in some health institutions. We got clobbered for something that had been allowed to build up, almost totally unaddressed, under the previous Government.