17 April 2024
Please find below a speech delivered today at 4pm outside Downing Street by Margaret Snowdon, Chair of the Pension Scams Industry Group. The speech was given as part of the ‘Enough is Enough’ protest march about regulator failures and the treatment of victims of pension scams and industry fraud.
I am marching today for justice for victims of financial misconduct.
My particular experience and expertise relate to pension scams.
For the last 10 years I have freely given a lot of my time to fight against pension scams of various types. I started doing this because I could see that scammers, many of them regulated advisers and some pretending to be, were able to get their hooks into ordinary hardworking people and fool them into believing that it was right to transfer their retirement savings to what looked like safe and secure pension schemes – the schemes were registered with HMRC after all.
The scammers were able to operate with impunity – authorities failed to stop them because they couldn’t see what was going wrong. Unlike good advisers, the scammers had no interest in doing the best thing for individuals they snared – on the contrary, the scammers got away with a fortune because very few have ever been held to account.
My goal in 2014 was to stop scammers being able to take people’s savings and my team of volunteers were and still are very successful at this. However, I began to see the horrible damage done to the lives of those who had already been scammed out of their savings. They and their families faced financial ruin as well as the mental anguish after falling for a scam. They got very little help and very little sympathy – in fact, they tended to be told it was their own fault that they trusted a scammer (by the way, even today 50% of us would fall for a scam, so it is wrong on so many levels to blame a victim who was targeted more than 10 years ago).
What I discovered was that HMRC and the government also blamed the victims, but worse than that, they assumed that all victims were guilty of trying to avoid tax. This is far from the truth. Ordinary people don’t understand complex pension rules and they certainly don’t associate pensions with tax, let alone tax avoidance. None the less, HMRC treats them all as if they were guilty of cheating the tax man. Therefore, on top of losing most of their savings, HMRC has pursued them for tax charges for over a decade; and has pursued them in an unnecessarily aggressive way. Now to be fair to HMRC, their job is to collect tax that is due. They say they have no choice,
but it is never reasonable to bully and frighten people and treat them criminals without any evidence. It’s a case of when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
For the last 5 years I have been asking parliament to change the law to fit the new world where fraudsters prey on innocent people then walk away without consequences, leaving ordinary people like nurses, machinists and fire fighters to face the music alone. The law needs to change to give HMRC the power to disapply tax charges in cases where losses were due to dishonesty by a third party. I have written to prime ministers, to chancellors, to treasury secretaries, but those who bother to reply just trot out the same old message – “our hands are tied/ the people did something they shouldn’t have/ we need to discourage others from doing the same.”
More recently I have discovered that this isn’t an issue limited to pension scam and pension savers, but it’s much much broader. I was shocked to learn that the same impact and systemic injustice is being experienced by many different victims in all kinds of financial schemes. Happening in one sector is a problem – happening in several means something is fundamentally broken.
That’s why I am marching today for justice for victims of financial misconduct across the UK – for people who have been let down by the system. People let down by police who don’t investigate the scammers, let down by politicians who can’t see that the world has become a dangerous place for retirement savers and for all victims of financial crime let down by unacceptable treatment by HMRC.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.
We are concerned about suicides, bankruptcies, hardship and severe welfare issues among taxpayers who were duped into entering schemes. Those issues are directly caused by HMRC’s sole focus on recovery of tax from the taxpayer rather than from the promoters, fraudsters and enablers of those schemes. HMRC chooses not to use discretion when dealing with victims of financial crime and thereby makes a bad situation much much worse. We are launching a national petition to demand change. We would love everyone to sign the petition and ask your friends to sign too. [ details of how to find and sign]. But this is not the end of the story. We are planning a major campaign for a statutory inquiry into these matters, so keep tuned.
This could happen to any of us – we all need to be safe from scammers, and we all need to be fairly treated by those in authority. So let’s all stand together for security and fairness.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.
– ENDS –
