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Brown’s £8 billion whopper

15 May, 2007

Dr Ros Altman, an independent policy adviser, has publicly criticised Brown’s so-called efforts to help salvage the crisis being experienced by UK pensions.

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Altman asserts: “Would-be Prime Minister Gordon Brown told an £8 billion whopper on breakfast TV yesterday. He boasted that he had put £8 billion into the Government’s rescue fund for the 125,000 working men and women robbed of their life savings when their company pension schemes collapsed.

“The truth is that, many years later, nine in every ten victims have not been paid a penny. Over 10,000 of the robber workers are already past pension age – some now in their 70s, some desperately ill – yet only 1,000 have received anything at all. These are people who were assured that their pensions had been property protected after the Maxwell scandal, yet they have ended up far worse off than Maxwell’s pensioners who were rescued within a few weeks.”

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Altman goes on to label the Government’s Financial Assistance Scheme as ‘the worst bureaucratic shambles in Whitehall’. These are strong words, but he continues by saying: “It has only paid out about £4 million and yet it has cost the taxpayer £10 million to run. The claims of £8 billion are just political spin, of the kind which Gordon Brown insisted last week he wanted to move away from.”

“We can only hope that Mr. Brown himself has been misled and does not realise that what he is saying is not actually true,” concludes Altman. “Time is running out for the victims of this scandal and they are looking to Mr. Brown to organise a proper rescue immediately and acknowledge the Government’s responsibility for what has happened to them. They have all had verdicts in their favour – the time for review is surely over and they need the money now.”

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