I want to speak in support of the Allied Steel and Wire workers, because they have a very just case. They are entitled to justice, and the campaign that they've been running is also one that reflects anomalies in the whole pension industry, going back to the early 1980s. And I go back to the 1980s—I mean, thank God at least then you at least had one baseline, which was the pensions directive from the European Union, and, of course, some of these protections we may actually lose in the future. I had a passing involvement as a trade union lawyer in, of course, the legal action on behalf of a community that went to the European Court, which was partly successful in the sense that the court recognised that the UK Government was in breach of its obligations but, of course, didn't impose a requirement for a system of compensation of 100 per cent, and that was the failure, and that was what subsequent regulation was meant to correct.

We need to go back also to the fact that this whole area of deregulation of the pension industry was a specific campaign by the insurance industry and an insurance industry that continues to have far too much and far too overbearing control and involvement in Government policies and particular current policies. And we have to remember also that it was the 1986 Act, under Margaret Thatcher, that resulted in that deregulation, and that deregulation—we need to think very carefully about what it actually did. It allowed companies to opt out of the obligation to provide occupational pensions. It allowed companies to take money out of surpluses of pensions, and it failed to provide for the risks that would arise in respect of companies becoming insolvent. And the reason those risks were disregarded was because it was an insurance industry that had the Government in its pocket. And we have to look, for example, at what happened to the Mineworkers' Pension Scheme, and of course there was a campaign ongoing with that with regard to the National Union of Mineworkers. 

And what happened because of that deregulation, and because of the pit closures at the time, was miners were being told, 'There you are, you can take your pension funds out, you can now transfer them'—from what is probably one of the world's most successful pension funds—'and put them in private pension funds.' And this is the way the industry worked. Insurance representatives went round the individual miners and they said, 'Oh, no, no, put your money into this fund, it'll be much, much better', but what they didn't tell the miner was that, for the first five years, they'd be paying money to the actual financial services people. And then, after five years, when they would start accumulating some benefit, someone would come along and say, 'Oh, so-and-so has gone now, I think we need to review', and then they'd do the same thing again. So, the miners were being continually robbed. And there were many other groups of workers who were in that same position. And, in fact, there was an assessment done by professional pension advisers—these are the professional advisers—69 per cent of them basically said that one of the consequences of Margaret Thatcher's deregulation was that she not only failed to see the effect of her regulations on pension schemes, but how much at risk members of these schemes would be in the event of the firms going into liquidation, and that is exactly what happened.

Now, various measures were put in place to try and assist since then, but what is very clear is we have a quagmire of regulations, and we now have whole groups of people where a surplus is being taken out of pensions when it suits either the employer, the Government, or a particular industry, and then, when there are subsequent gaps in there, it is the workers, the people who pay in their pensions over all those many years, who then actually suffer. So, we actually have—. We have the Allied Steel and Wire workers, many of whom are now massively reduced in terms of the amount of pension they are entitled to by virtue of their contributions. We have the Women Against State Pension Inequality, where Government changed regulations and suddenly you have people now having to work another five, six, seven years because of changes in terms of the pensions. And we have a Government taking billions of pounds out of the most successful workers' pension scheme in the world, the mineworkers pension scheme, and the Government refusing to negotiate over a rearrangement—not an abolition of those arrangements, but a rearrangement.

So, I support this because not only are the ASW workers right, but there is a need for a wholesale review of what has been happening with pensions, what continues to happen—the legislation coming through now restricting the rights of people to compensation in favour of the insurance industry, an insurance industry that benefits from every piece of legislation, and there is no evidence of people actually benefiting from that. And the fact that we have a Government that is in the pocket of the insurance industry I think is really very, very worrying. So, I think a royal commission on pensions, a review of pensions—something that basically sets the objective of restoring justice—but also re-establishing a proper pension scheme so that, when workers pay into those pension schemes, they're entitled to what they paid in when they get to the entitlement to a pension.