January Update

Dear Policyholder,

 

This is the first update since the start of the New Year and I hope that all of you will have received the mailing from Norwich Union which also contained a letter and leaflet from Clare. That was an update from the material we posted in the website in September. One of the most important things from the December communication was the confirmation of the eligibility criteria for any incentive payment from a reattribution. Norwich Union produced a special booklet on this subject which was available if policyholders wanted a copy. You can see this material in our reports section.

As you might recall from our email in December we have been asking a lot of questions of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and we felt that there remained questions after their reply. We are still waiting for a reply to two letters to the chairman of the FSA, Sir Callum McCarthy, and we hope that we will get these very soon.

In the meantime the Treasury Select Committee held hearings with the FSA on Tuesday and we wrote to the chairman, John McFall MP (who is, incidentally, appearing on Radio 4s 'Any Questions' tonight). Mr McFall has an interest in the reattribution and asked some questions about it in October last year. We sent him and his committee a letter http://www.policyholderadvocate.org/downloads/Treasury-Select-Committee-McFall-letter-210108.pdf and issued a press release http://www.policyholderadvocate.org/downloads/MediaRelease-21Jan2008.pdf raising some of the issues that are important to us as we try to understand the impact of all their rules on the value of what a fair reattribution payment might be.

You might be interested in the result which was that the Select Committee spent about 20 minutes asking questions of Hector Sants, the chief executive of the FSA. There is a transcript of the exchanges on this site which you can read http://www.policyholderadvocate.org/downloads/Video-Conference-Transcript-230108.pdf. The questions and answers are about quite technical matters, but they are important.

There has also been quite a lot of press coverage over last weekend and this week, much of which has been very surprising to us. Rather than summarise it in details I have put web links in to the various newspapers so you can see them for yourselves. However, from our point of view the BBC website puts it rather neatly:

'Clare Spottiswoode, who was praised by Hector Sants for her professionalism during the Treasury Select Committee hearing, denied that she was unnecessarily delaying matters.

"This complex process isn't over and my job is to challenge every bit of it, to see whether we can get more money for policyholders," she said.

"I want to get a final offer so that I can go to policyholders and I can say whether I think it is fair. I want this to happen without delay," she added.'

Of course, you will - rightly - want to know what we have to say about the latest state of play, so here it is:

- We are fully committed to the process and have had meetings with Norwich Union this week and have more in the diary. Indeed as I write this there is a meeting going on next door with four members of the Norwich Union team, a team of four from NU's actuarial consultants Tillinghast and an actuary working for the FSA who is here as an observer.

- We are close to having the information necessary to complete our understanding of the many aspects of the deal and the way they affect the value of the deal seen from the perspective of policyholders and shareholders.

- Our negotiations have been underway all the time that we have been asking questions of the FSA

- We want to arrive at a point soon where Norwich Union gives us a final deal and then we will be able to say whether we think it is fair and policyholders can decide what they want to do.

To finish up I should also add that Clare - and the other three of us who work with her every day - is very aware that this has been going on for a long time and we want to move to a close. All this effort is aimed at only one thing - we want policyholders to get a fair deal.

I hope you have a great weekend.

 

Yours faithfully,

 

Jonathan Haslam

Director of Communications

 

P.S. As always we check the links work before posting these updates, but if by any chance they don't, just cut and paste them into your browser.

(If you are confused by the headline in this story from The Daily Telegraph, so are we)

 

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