A number of constituents have asked me to take up cases concerning EL compensation. I am well aware that some are not happy with the level of pay outs offered by the government.
The Minister has recently brought us up to date with progress. 896,367 policyholders have now received an aggregate amount of compensation in excess of £1 billion. There may be as many as 142,000 remaining policyholders entitled to some compensation but they have not yet made their whereabouts known to the Scheme administrators, or the payments office has not been able to validate their claim.
Anyone who thinks they are entitled to compensation who has not received their cash should contact the scheme on 033 0200 150.
March 4, 2015
The problem is John, that policy holders are only being compensated for 22% of their losses.
If the company had completely failed then policy holders would have got 90% under government legislation.
The other problem is that the calculation is not transparent in allowing claimants to see how such compensation is being calculated in the first place.
If you complain about the calculation, or ask to be shown the basis of the amount given, they threaten to take all payments back pending a review.
Why deliberately hide the calculation method if it is supposed to be fair.?
March 5, 2015
Thank you John, for including Equitable Life (EL) Compensation in your blog. John knows that as the Active Member of the Equitable Life Members Action Group (EMAG) in Wokingham I have been leading the fight for proper compensation for Wokingham EL policyholders for 15 years now as a matter of principle.
I am grateful to John for being one of the MPs that has fought on our behalf to get the Coalition to give us some of our money back. But there are still some who have received nothing, some who have received 22.45% of their own money and the With Profits Annuity holders, who were promised 100% of their money back by the Chancellor, and have received about 22% as well!
We are promised a total compensation of £1.5 billion and we are fighting for the remaining £4.3 billion of our money back. This was discussed in a Commons debate on 26 February last, which about 40 MPs attended. All of the MPs who spoke supported the proposal for the Government to pay full compensation during the period of the next Parliament.
In summary, we did the right thing and saved for our retirement. There was maladministration and Chancellor George Brown appears to have made an arbitrary decision not to pay us what we were due under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme at the time, which would have given us at least 80% of our money back. EMAG estimates that over 3 million other investors have received compensation during the 15 years we have been fighting for ours! We ask: Why have we been discriminated against?!