#DWP bungled #Waspi women’s #pension-age rise. How long must they wait for #compensation?
WASPI protesters: this image is from 2016 and women born in the 1950s had already spent years protesting against the way the Department for Work and Pensions mistreated them.
The so-called Waspi women have finally won recognition that they were mistreated by the government, after an ombudsman found maladministration by the Department for Work and Pensions.
But they won’t get any compensation for it – at least, not yet – because the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) has no power to order it.
The PHSO found that the DWP failed to act quickly enough, once it knew a significant proportion of women were not aware that the age at which they would qualify for the state pension was going up.
It should have written to the women affected by the change, at least 28 months – more than two years – earlier than it did.
The ombudsman’s report said
Between 1995 and 2004, accurate information about changes to State Pension age was publicly available in leaflets, through DWP’s pensions education campaigns, through DWP’s agencies and on its website.
[But the DWP} failed to give due weight to relevant considerations, including what research showed about the need for ‘appropriately targeted’ information, what was known about the need for individually tailored information, or how likely it was doing the same thing would achieve different results. Despite having identified more it could do, DWP failed to provide the public with as full information as possible. DWP failed to make a reasonable decision about next steps in August 2005.It did not ‘get it right’. And its failure to use feedback to improve service delivery meant it did not ‘seek continuous improvement’. That was maladministration.
DWP then failed to act promptly on its 2006 proposal to write directly to affected women, or to give due weight to how much time had already been lost since the 1995 Pensions Act.
It did not ‘get it right’ because it did not meet the requirements of the Civil Service Code, and it did not take all relevant considerations into account. And it failed again to use feedback to improve service delivery and ‘seek continuous improvement’. That was also maladministration.
The maladministration led to a delay in DWP writing directly to women
about changes in State Pension age. If the maladministration had not happened, DWP would have begun writing to affected women by December 2006 at the latest, 28 months earlier than it did (in April 2009).It follows that affected women should have had at least 28 months’ more individual notice of the changes. For women who were not aware of the changes, the opportunity that additional notice would have given them to adjust their retirement plans was lost.
The investigation is not over; its next stage will consider the impact that the injustice had on the women it affected.
The co-chairs of the All-party parliamentary group on State Pension Inequality for Women, Andrew Gwynne (Labour) and Peter Aldous (Conservative) have both welcomed the findings.
“The DWP must urgently address these findings, and advise 1950s women what actions they will take to right the wrongs committed by successive Governments. For too long 1950s women have been ignored, and this must change,” said Mr Gwynne.
And Mr Aldous added: “We now must see a cross-party effort to sort this problem out. This issue is bigger than any administration and has been raised repeatedly over the last 25 years. The PHSO findings must now be scrutinised by the DWP and parliament, and then we must set out about compensating women for this injustice.”
It seems the DWP itself isn’t ready to comment yet:
I asked DWP for a comment but essentially it can't give a detailed one until the rest of the enquiry is complete. It reminded me that the actions it took were lawful and challenges to Supreme Court had failed. Of course, maladministration and lawfulness could both be true. https://t.co/dMNxixL6K1
— Paul Lewis (@paullewismoney) July 20, 2021
Waspi women have already waited many years for an admission that they were mistreated by the government, and that they have suffered loss as a result.
It seems they may not have to wait even longer before getting any compensation for the loss they have suffered and the huge amount of distress it has caused.
Source: Women’s state pension: Compensation closer for Waspi campaigners – BBC News
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Thank you Mike for this info.
Labour throwing the election against Labour winning in 2019, lost 1950s women £31,100 compensation only offered by Jeremy Corbyn.
We did not lose the Supreme Court case, as the case was not permitted to be heard, for the bogus reason of being out of time, when the two lower courts, High and Appeal Courts, had accepted the case to be heard, yet years after the event.
Also what the PHSO said in its first report is a lie. We were not told about pension age rise between 1995 and 2004. The PHSO is playing politics and trying to blame only Labour.
Only the Tories passed the 1995 pension act raising women’s pension age from 60 to 65. They had two years still in government to individually write to us.
Yes Labour did not tell us about Labour’s 2004 Finance Act, that rose early works pension age from 50 to 55 (law in 2010) nor about Labour’s 2007 pension act (amending the Tory 1995 pension act, for pension ages 66, 67 and 68).
But the WASPI complaint is not about those laws, but only the 1995 pension act passed by the Tory government.
The PHSO complaint is maladministration of a government department, and therefore an entirely different part of civil law to the BackTo60 group’s High Court Judicial Review case.