Equitable Life chief criticises Chadwick compensation figures

Equitable Life chief executive Chris Wiscarson has written to Treasury minister Mark Hoban to criticise the Chadwick Report, which has controversially proposed that policyholders should receive only a tenth of their losses.

Sir John Chadwick’s report suggested only between £400 million and £500 million should be paid in compensation to people who lost money from Equitable Life’s near collapse in 2000.

Wiscarson said £4.8 billion – the figure acknowledged in the report to be the total losses suffered by 1 million policyholders – should be the basis for compensation.

'We have never supported an approach which places store on the methodology used in calculating the lower ranges of numbers quoted by the minister,' he told the Sunday Telegraph.

The Chadwick report was commissioned by the previous Labour government, which did not accept all of the findings of an earlier report by the Parliamentary Ombudsman, Ann Abraham. She found the government guilty of 10 counts of maladministration, but it accepted only five findings of maladministration in full; it accepted four in part and rejected one. The Chadwick Report was commissioned on that basis.

'We cannot support the conclusions of a report which has objectives that appear to us quite different from what was anticipated by the Parliamentary Ombudsman,' he said.