The Government has yet again ruled out using taxpayers’ money to compensate employees whose pension schemes collapsed. Parliamentary Ombudsman, Ann Abraham told MP’s that the government ‘appeared to have an attitude where it could ignore rulings where it was guilty of maladministration, leading to disrespect for her office’. The Work & Pensions secretary dismissed her findings, saying that it was the first time that the department had ever disagreed with such a decision, and ministers and Gordon Brown had only come to that said decision with ‘extreme reluctance’.
Our view
Either way, it will be the people that pay - whether through higher taxes on income, or levies on surviving pension funds or 'robbery' of orphaned assets from old bank and building society accounts. This is merely political spin on how a message is delivered.