Women’s State Pension Age: Ombudsman Report

Anna Firth Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Duncan Baker]

I totally agree with the hon. Gentleman. It is now about speed, and I will come to that point later in my speech.

WASPI women have already suffered for years and years and, now this report has been published, we should learn from the other injustices we have seen, such as the Post Office scandal, that speed is of the essence. We need to come up with a remedy as quickly as possible.

[Anna Firth (Southend West) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech about the impact on individuals, as well as the numbers. Does he agree that this is about fairness, taking into account the individual facts of each case? Leigh lady Maggie Briley retired four years before she turned 60 to look after her parents with dementia. Not getting her pension, as she fully expected, at 60 meant that she had to sell her home and take up a low-paid job to make ends meet, and of course she could not look after her parents, who suffered as well. Does my hon. Friend agree that this is about not just fast compensation but fair compensation, based on the individual circumstances of each case? That is not necessarily just for Maggie, but for the 5,220 WASPI women in my constituency.

[Duncan Baker]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is about individuals, and every single individual who has been impacted has a different life story to tell. It is very difficult for the Government to come up with a redress scheme that covers every eventuality because, as my hon. Friend says, individual circumstances affect everyone who has been impacted.

All right, some ladies have coped. They might have had savings, earnings or private pensions, and in some cases they were lucky enough to have family who were able to help, but an awful lot of women had absolutely none of that. Huge numbers have suffered through absolutely no fault of their own. As has been repeated many times, many WASPI women have died in recent years.

We cannot imagine just how difficult it must have been for some of these women, who have had so little, to cope through the time delay they have suffered. It was not their fault. Back home in North Norfolk, like my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Anna Firth), I hear of dreadful cases of women who gave up work to care for a sick or dying husband. They were totally reliant on the pension they thought was going to come, but it did not, and they were perhaps not able to go back to work or find employment. It is not easy. In those cases, the injustice has had a profound impact on people’s lives, livelihoods, mental wellbeing and, in many cases, financial standing, which has been so damaging for so many women.

I am a new MP—not so new any more, I guess—and we see so many injustices. It is a privilege to try to fix them, whether it is infected blood, the loan charge, Hillsborough or the Post Office, which is particularly pertinent to me. We in this place should learn how we can try to sort out some of these injustices.

Both Ministers are excellent, decent, empathetic people. I have previously spoken to them about this issue, and I know they care deeply about it. As has already been said, we should be honest about today’s debate. The public purse does not have billions of pounds of spare capacity at the moment, and the people of this country who are watching are intelligent. They can see that the financial scarring of the pandemic weighs very heavily on us.

In this debate, we should be practical with our suggestions, and the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms) proposed a set of in-depth, practical steps. Many of the WASPI Campaign’s briefings and requests are entirely sensible, and it has a real right to be heard. There is no longer any debate about the ombudsman’s report, as far as I am concerned. It clearly found that there was maladministration between 2005 and 2007 and, as we have heard time and again, that delay led to this problem.

We need to get over that point. It has happened. There is a problem, and there is no point denying it. I hear the odd cursory comment from constituents who say, “Well, they should have known about it. It was advertised enough.” That is not fair. The ombudsman’s report makes that very clear. These women were failed, in many cases, by the state.

The redress, the compensation mechanism, must be clear and fair. As we heard, there must be speed, sensitivity and simplicity. The WASPI Campaign’s brief is very sensible in saying that the Government should come forward with a two-pronged approach that delivers a higher level of compensation to those with the shortest notice of the longest delay to receiving their state pension. Why is that fair? Because those are the women who are impacted the most. If they were impacted the most, they are the ones who have suffered the most, and they deserve that redress. But that is not enough not to think about everybody else. It is sensible to put together some eligibility criteria that enable all the other impacted cohorts to be able to make a claim for compensation. It is right that we come forward with that as quickly as possible.

One thing I have learned in this place, not to be too facetious, is that things do not happen very quickly, but this is something that should be happening quickly. When the public mood moves, as we saw with the Post Office scandal, we know that we can move quickly. We have the report, and the WASPI women have already suffered for an inordinate amount of time. I urge the Government to come up with that remedy, and to get on with it quickly.