The Department for Work and Pensions has defended the Conservative Party minister’s Labour party membership to FTAdviser.
A spokesman for the DWP told FTAdviser: “Ros has taken an interest in all three parties (this is because prior to the election she worked on policy, not politics, and wanted to keep in touch with what each party was doing).
“The story here is surely that despite the Labour Party boasting of its scrupulous checking they still sent a Conservative Minister a voting form.”
Today (8 September) The Huffington Post UK revealed Tory minister Ros Altmann has been expelled from the Labour Party after it discovered she has been a member for more than 18 months.
The Conservative minister was made a peer by David Cameron soon after his general election victory in May when she was still a Labour party member as her membership renewed automatically in March this year.
Along with the DWP, swift to her defence was Tom McPhail, head of pensions research at Hargreaves Lansdown, who pointed out she has in fact worked closely - and had her expertise called upon - by all three main political parties during her career.
Ms Altmann was first brought in to the Westminster fold by Tony Blair’s New Labour government.
She worked as an independent adviser to Blair’s government and the financial industry on pensions, savings and investment policy, notably advising the Labour government on pension policy issues including the Equitable Life crisis.
Baroness Altmann was instrumental in the early 2000s in helping get the Labour government of the day to provide compensation to workers whose pensions were lost as a result of their employer going bust, leaving behind an inadequately funded pension scheme.
The setting up of the Financial Assistance Scheme was swiftly followed by the creation of the Pension Protection Fund, which now provides a pension backstop for anyone whose works pension is wound up.
He said: “She had also been a close ally of the Liberal Democrat pensions minister Steve Webb. Ros was brought into the current government because she has very considerable expertise in pensions and because she has been an effective campaigner for justice on pension related issues.
“Her political sympathies are less important than whether she can perform a good job as the pensions minister.”
Speaking to Financial Adviser’s Simoney Kyriakou back in 2010 when she was appointed chief executive of Saga, Ms Altmann was asked her views on the politics and politicians of the early 21st Century.
At that time, she said: “As the pensions crisis unfolded – against the deteriorating demographic profile – politicians have tinkered and fiddled with the system, while problems mounted.
“All our economic futures will be harmed if the current situation is not urgently addressed.”
More recently the pension policymaker also worked closely with the Liberal Democrats’ Steve Webb when he had her current job.
She was the coalition’s business champion for older workers before Mr Webb failed to get re-elected this year.
Ms Altmann, who graduated from University College London in 1977 with a Hume-Lloyd Scholarship for top results, went on to Harvard to study public policy and government, before completing a doctorate in economics at the London School of Economics, focusing on poverty and the incomes of the elderly.
emma.hughes@ft.com
