Yet another stinging betrayal for the Waspi women

There are two main objections to the government’s decision to deny justice to the so-called (Women Against State Pension Inequality)Waspi women. The first is the substance of it — it is neither morally nor legally defensible. The second is the manner of it — raising and then dashing hopes in an almost callous manner.

Pat McFadden, the secretary of state for work and pensions, is only the latest minister — his Conservative predecessors were no better — to do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, according to The Independent.

As we have said before, the scale of the financial and emotional damage wreaked on the Women Against State Pension Inequality, who have effectively been robbed of a very large proportion of their state pension, is both wide and grievous. All women born in the 1950s — as many as 3.8 million individuals — have suffered a toll on their standard of living, and in some cases, where their health has been adversely affected, the full costs involved are incalculable. To be fair to Mr McFadden, he had some plausible arguments in his favour, not least affordability, given the state of the public finances and the public’s understandable resistance to further tax rises, even for such a compelling cause.

The pensions secretary also constructed a careful, if bureaucratic, argument about the impossibility at this distance of ascertaining whether or not each of the millions of women affected received the correct notification about the successive postponements of their state retirement pension, in 1995 and again in 2011 — an objectionable policy in the first place.

There is also no question that previous governments have issued leaflets and mounted education campaigns in GP surgeries, on TV and radio, in cinemas, and online. It was reported and discussed in the media — a big story at the time.

Even so, Mr McFadden had to concede that individual letters about changes to the state pension age could have been sent earlier, and that it is evident, from the sincere personal testimony of those affected, that these women were not fully alert to the news or its consequences. Mr McFadden thus had no alternative but to repeat the apology issued by his immediate predecessor, Liz Kendall, in respect of when the letters were sent.

The problem with the case for refusing compensation that Mr McFadden presented to the Commons is that it merely attempted to relitigate the judgment issued by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) in March 2024. But, unlike the ombudsman, Mr McFadden is not an independent adjudicator, and cannot gainsay what the ombudsman found after much patient research and sifting of the evidence.

Indeed, the recommendations made by the PHSO on compensation for the Waspi women were relatively modest, so far as the indirect losses to the women are concerned — many having given up work and made provision for their retirement on the wrong assumptions. The PHSO set compensation at between £1,000 and £2,950. In the aggregate, however, this would cost the Exchequer up to £10bn (though possibly much less — depending on the pattern of claims).

As early as 2021, the PHSO ruled that the British state was guilty of “maladministration”, had ignored its own research showing that women didn’t know about pension-age changes, and had failed to write to women in time. That is a powerful moral and legal point.

The recommendations of the PHSO are not binding, but it is usual for them to be accepted. They are analogous to the settlements that followed the infected blood and Post Office Horizon scandals (though these are also running late). To put things crudely, it seems as though the Waspi women were at the back of the queue when the crisis in the public finances became really acute, and there was no money left. Certainly, the Conservative government didn’t make any effort to honour this financial obligation by the time the July 2024 general election arrived.