Women’s State Pension Age: Ombudsman Report

Alison McGovern Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

I, too, thank the Backbench Business Committee for making time for this important debate from the limited time that it has to allocate. I have listened carefully to every contribution. A number of Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), the hon. Members for Livingston (Hannah Bardell), for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens), and for Strangford (Jim Shannon), and the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford), talked about the experience of women who have been part of this campaign, or who described to their MP what they had been through. Some Members, including my hon. Friends the Members for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood), and for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey), also mentioned the context of those experiences, and the systematic sexism that women have faced.

Other Members described the detail of the ombudsman’s report, and the possibilities for redress, including the hon. Members for Waveney (Peter Aldous), for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker), for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain), and for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald), and my right hon. Friends the Members for Knowsley (Sir George Howarth), and for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms), who chairs the Work and Pensions Committee.

We have had a thorough and extensive debate this afternoon. I recognise and pay tribute to the women who have joined us today, or who have watched the debate from afar. As I say, it has been a full discussion. The ombudsman’s report is important and has serious lessons for the Government. It also relates the serious consequences for the women who experienced the events that it describes. The ombudsman has rightly said that it is for the Government to respond, and that Parliament should consider the report’s findings. As we have heard, the Work and Pensions Committee has begun that process, and will hear from Ministers next week, I believe. I will follow those proceedings carefully.

In March, the Secretary of State said in this Chamber that he would proceed “without undue delay”, and on Monday he said that he still required an appropriate amount of time to consider the ombudsman’s conclusion. My first question is about time. For all the reasons that Members have set out, it would be helpful if the Minister set out a timescale, and told us, crucially, what advice has been provided to the Government, and what analysis is under way in the Department. It would be helpful to know what the process is.

In the absence of that further update from the Government, Labour’s position remains the same as it was when the ombudsman’s report was published. We are all waiting for the Government to respond, so I will not diverge from what my hon. Friend and colleague the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) said six weeks ago. Although I understand the political reasons why the SNP wants to put pressure on me, I am not the Minister, and I do not have access to the information and advice that the Government have. I therefore call on the Government to respond without delay.

Issues around changes to the state pension have spanned multiple Parliaments, but I remind everybody that the moment that sparked the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign was the Pensions Act 2011, in which the then Chancellor, George Osborne, decided to accelerate state pension age increases with very little notice—a time described accurately by the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber. George Osborne’s comment that that

“probably saved more money than anything else we’ve done”

made me angry at the time, as I imagine it angered many other women. During that period, Labour tabled amendments that would have ensured that proper notice was given, so that women could plan for their retirement. That would have gone some way to dealing with the problem.

Have the Government, even now, done an analysis of why they pressed ahead with the changes, despite the clear consequences? In any case, the ombudsman began investigating how changes to the state pension age were communicated in 2019. That year, the High Court ruled that the ombudsman could not recommend changes to the state pension itself, or the reimbursement of lost pensions, because those issues had been decided on by Parliament, as many Members have mentioned.

The ombudsman’s report states that internal research from DWP in 2004 found that about 40% of the women affected knew about the changes to the state pension age. Is that still the Government’s assessment, now that the report has been published, or are they looking for other evidence? What is their assessment of the total number of women who would receive compensation under the different options put forward by the ombudsman? How many of them are the poorest pensioners, and how many of them are on pension credit? How many of those affected have already retired or sadly passed away? Given that the Government knew, as Members have described, that there were problems communicating the changes to the state pension age, I wonder about that moment in 2011, and precisely what advice was provided to Ministers at the time.

Let us think about the principle here. The Government are committed to providing 10 years’ notice of future changes to the state pension age. In 2015, the Pensions Commission found that that should be 15 years’ notice. It is important for the Government to state why there is that difference. We all want a result of this debate to be a guarantee that information about any future changes to the state pension age will be timely and helpful for the individuals affected. We have problems with the pensions dashboards. What is going on with pensions information? Crucially, will the response to the ombudsman’s report, when it comes, contain a list of the lessons that the Department is learning, and measures that it is putting in place?

The ombudsman took the rare decision to ask Parliament to intervene on this issue because it had doubts, as many Members have described, about whether the Department would provide a remedy. In the light of those concerns, and to aid Parliament with its work, I ask again, as we did previously, for the Government to commit to laying out all relevant information, and placing it in the Library. I have some experience of dealing with historical injustices, and I must impress on the Minister that my experience from dealing with the Hillsborough disaster is that open access to the evidence is extremely important. I hope that, in the spirit of the Hillsborough law, the Government will come forward and put that information before us, so that we can see it.

I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say. I do not imagine that we will get a response today to the ombudsman’s report, but will he at least set out the timetable for a response, because we cannot move on until we have that? I hope that the women affected by all these changes—including those changes expedited in 2011—who were born just after the second world war can soon hear the Government’s response. As many have mentioned, they were born long before a woman’s place at work, and women’s full rights to their own earnings and pensions, were secured.

This place has always been slow when it comes to women’s rights. In 1951, more than 30 years after women could first come here, just 17 of 650 MPs were women, yet women of that generation built the platform that we all stand on. They fought to change things for women, and the least they deserve is a response from the Government to the ombudsman’s report.