Today Colin Brown, Chairman of the Financial Services Consumer Panel, welcomed the Penrose inquiry's remit to look back as far as necessary to unravel the root causes of the Equitable Life crisis.

He said ‘At last an inquiry will be looking at how the problem started. Until now the investigations by the Financial Services Authority and the Treasury Committee have covered only part of the story. We're looking forward to seeing the FSA's report, but that can only cover the period after January 1999. Similarly, the Treasury Committee has shed little light on the regulation of Equitable before 1999. We have been arguing for an investigation that goes back to the earliest decisions regarding the guaranteed annuity policies.'

The Panel wrote to the Treasury Committee in January this year arguing that the lack of an inquiry into the role of the prudential insurance regulators before 1999 was ‘a serious gap in the scrutiny of the events that led up to Equitable Life's closure to new business'. It said that an inquiry with a longer time-frame was ‘essential to delivering meaningful conclusions about what should have been done, by whom and when, to prevent the present crisis.'

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Notes to editors