Women’s State Pension Age: Ombudsman Report

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I agree. The Government have said that they will respond without “undue delay”, and that they are considering the report in detail. Can the Minister tell the House this afternoon whether the Government will bring forward proposals for remedy, as the Work and Pensions Committee believes that they should, before the summer recess? We should set a clear timetable.

We need a scheme that is easy to administer. The ombudsman said that, in principle, redress should reflect the impact on each individual, but it recognised that the need to avoid delay, and the large numbers involved,

“may indicate the need for a more standardised approach”.

Jane Cowley, the WASPI campaign manager, told the Work and Pensions Committee that given the need for action

“within weeks rather than years”,

the scheme should be based on three principles: speed, simplicity and sensitivity. The evidence that has been gathered points to a rules-based approach to working out the compensation that should be paid.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I have read the evidence given to the right hon. Member’s Committee, which was taken in April this year. If the Government agreed that they had to accept responsibility for this issue and to go forward with it, how quickly could we start to see the highly justified compensation being paid to these women?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I would hope quite quickly, and I will explain why.

The payments involved would be adjusted within a range, based on the ombudsman’s severity of injustice scale. It would depend on two variables: first, the extent of the change to the individual’s state pension age—how much it increased by—and, secondly, the notice that the individual received. The less notice someone had of the change, and the bigger the change to their state pension age, the higher the payment they would receive. An arrangement like that would not be perfect, but it would be quite quick and relatively inexpensive to administer compared with a more bespoke system, because it would involve applying known data to a formula to work out the amount that was due. I ask the Minister whether he accepts that, in principle, a rules-based system would be the best way forward.

Beyond that, it was suggested to the Work and Pensions Committee that there should be some flexibility for individuals to make the case, after the standard payment has been calculated, that they experienced direct financial loss as a result of the maladministration, and that they should therefore be entitled to a higher level of compensation. Flexibility would be needed, because although the ombudsman did not see direct financial loss in the six sample complaints that it looked at, it did not exclude the possibility that there could be in other cases. For example, Angela Madden, the chair of the WASPI campaign, suggested to us that somebody whose divorce settlement was less than it would have been because it was based on the expectation that she would receive her state pension at the age of 60, might well be entitled to a larger amount because of that particular development.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

This has been a timely and very powerful debate. We have heard some incredible contributions from many Members, who have shared first-hand knowledge of their constituents and the way they have been treated. I was very moved by what was said by the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) about the couple in his constituency who have basically lost everything because of this whole sorry saga. Some 3.8 million women have been affected by this issue, and many have now died—possibly over 270,000.

This debate would not be happening if it was not for the bravery of the WASPI women campaigners over many years. I have always been impressed by their verve and the demands that they bring to any occasion, and by their dressing appropriately in suffragette colours—one cannot miss them at any event or meeting anywhere. We should pay tribute to all of them for the incredible work that they have put into drawing attention to this grotesque injustice over many years. They deserve to know that they will get an answer that will give them some comfort and hope.

In the last decade, only three or four ombudsman’s reports have gone to Parliament because the Government have refused to acknowledge or accept them. The whole principle of the ombudsman is that it is an independent, non-political office that makes recommendations on the basis of the evidence it has collected. It went to a great deal of trouble to collect evidence and chose a sample of cases to give a holistic view on the situation, so the very least we can do is expect that the Government will undertake to act on the report.

I was very impressed by the Work and Pensions Committee’s evidence session on 7 May. I was impressed by the campaign’s detail, by the evidence it presented and by the commendable speed with which it responded to the Committee and to the all-party parliamentary group on state pension inequality for women, chaired by the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) and my hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey). We need to thank the campaign for its work.

The WASPI women came up during the last two general election campaigns, and let us be absolutely clear that my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and I committed that an incoming Labour Government would have dealt with this issue, compensated the WASPI women and accepted that a grotesque injustice had been done. That would have been expensive but, as I tried to explain in my interview with Andrew Neil, it would only have redressed an injustice. It would not have been throwing Government money around willy-nilly. Treating people properly is a moral issue.

Many would say that Parliament is now confronted with a problem not of its own making, and that it has to do something to try to resolve the issue. Well, we are always confronted with problems not of our own making. We do not make problems—[Interruption.] Well, I hope we do not make problems, but we have to deal with them. In the case of the problems that have recently come before us—the injustice of the mineworkers’ pension scheme, the injustice of freezing the pension rate for overseas pensioners, the Horizon scandal, and the enormous question of the contaminated blood scandal—we are here to resolve those problems and secure justice for people who have suffered a grotesque injustice. People look to Parliament to achieve that.

We have the report, the information and the knowledge. We understand the injustice that has been done, the poverty that many people have been forced into and the insult when a person in their 60s finds that they cannot access their pension and is told by a DWP job adviser to take an apprenticeship, which is ludicrous. They know full well that they are not going to get it. Those people feel a sense of hurt. They believe that they did the right thing, and they believe that the Government and the DWP have done the wrong thing by them.

Rebecca Hilsenrath answered question 51 of the Work and Pensions Committee’s evidence session, on whether information should have been made better available, which obviously it should have been, by saying that services should be “user-focused”. She thought that the information system was poor, and that the advertising of it was poor.

Clearly many very well informed people were not aware of the dangerous situation they were moving into with their own personal finances. There is an opportunity to resolve this, and it could be resolved with a statement from the Government today undertaking that, by 18 July, when I understand the summer recess starts, they will put forward a proposal for a simple compensation scheme based on a formula, as the Chair of Work and Pensions Committee set out, to ensure that compensation can be speedily paid. If compensation was individualised, we would clearly have to deal with several million individual cases, which would take a very long time.

What we need is justice, and it is up to this Parliament to deliver that justice for women who worked so hard to deliver the services from which we have all benefited. We owe it to them, and we can do it now.