Updated 31 August 2026
EMAG exists to campaign for full government compensation. Will members of EMAG please note that because of pressure of work we regret it is not possible to answer individual written enquiries.
How would you feel if your pension was lost because of others' failures?
EMAG calls on the new Prime Minister and Chancellor to settle the unpaid debt to Equitable Life victims
The Labour Government rightly allocated £11.8bn to compensation victims of the contaminated blood scandal. It also rightly allocated £1.8bn to rectify the injustice to the sub-postmasters in the Horizon IT scandal. But nearly one million victims of the Equitable Life scandal are still waiting for the £2.6bn unpaid balance of compensation they are still owed following government and regulatory maladministration, as found by the Parliamentary Ombudsman.
EMAG is calling on the new Prime Minister and Chancellor to pay the victims of the Equitable Life scandal the money that they are still owed – money they worked hard for and responsibly saved for their retirement. EMAG believes that, where the State accepts responsibility for a failure and also calculates how much people lost because of it – as it has in the case of Equitable Life – it should provide full financial redress.
Treasury set to pocket £171m of our compensation
EMAG has established that, as of May 2025, £171m of the compensation made available for policyholders is set to be kept in the Treasury's pockets. In 2010 the government announced that 37,000 post-92 WPAs would get “100%“ compensation via an annual payment for life, with £625m allocated and indexed at the time for this purpose. £100m was held back by the Treasury as a contingency. The rest - £775m - was allocated for distribution amongst 895,000 non-WPA policyholders via a one-off payment.
From FOIs and other information EMAG can show that the spending on annual payments to WPAs was £47m less than forecast up to 30 May 2025. This significant underspend means the £100m held will never be needed as a contingency. In addition, the government failed to trace around 100,000 other policyholders, leading to a £24m underspend of compensation for non-WPAs.
In total this means £171m - over 10% - of the limited money made available for compensation - is set to be kept by the Treasury and not reach the people to whom it is owed. Were this to happen it would be a further slap in the face for those who worked so hard to save for their retirement and who relied on the regulators to do their jobs.
It would add insult to injury considering that the Parliamentary Ombudsman ruled that regulators comprehensively failed to implement the system that Parliament had legislated for, leading to a financial loss of £4.1bn for around one million people.
Paul Weir at the ‘Enough is Enough March for Justice’
EMAG Chair Paul Weir speaking outside the Treasury
Application for House of Commons debate
Fabian Hamilton MP, with cross-party support from around 30 fellow Members of Parliament, has applied for a backbench business debate on the Equitable Life scandal. While there is significant competition for such slots, we are hopeful that one may be allocated by the Backbench Business Committee, hopefully around the time of the upcoming Budget which is scheduled for 28 October.
EMAG AGM
EMAG's Annual General Meeting took place on Monday 24 November via Zoom. All resolutions before the meeting were carried.
