Women’s State Pension Age: Ombudsman Report

Owen Thompson Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Patricia Gibson]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I take on board your comments.

None of the UK Government’s intransigence has distracted from the dignity with which with the campaigners have conducted themselves over the long years that this swindle—and it is a swindle—has been carried out. My hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) raised a good point about our disappointment—some would say disgust—at the Labour party’s current position, but I will respond to his concerns in due course. After years of marching, lobbying, letter and email writing, attending surgeries and tireless campaigning, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman has finally reported. The report vindicates the WASPI women and highlights the DWP’s failure to communicate, which

“negatively affected complainants’ sense of personal autonomy and control over their finances.”

The report found:

“the DWP did not adequately investigate and respond to complaints”.

In a damning condemnation, it highlighted that, despite all of that, the DWP

“will not take steps to put things right”

and that its refusal to do so was unacceptable. It concluded:

“Parliament needs now to act swiftly, and make sure a compensation scheme is established. We think this will provide women with the quickest route to remedy.”

This is surely one of the gravest injustices of our time, alongside the contaminated blood scandal and the Horizon scandal. It is another example of citizens having things done to them, which by every measure is wrong and unjust.

[Owen Thompson (Midlothian) (SNP)]

I commend my hon. Friend for securing today’s debate. On behalf of the Midlothian WASPI women, I thank her for all her work, and all Members who have contributed to making this debate happen. Does she agree that the fact that these injustices happen over and over again shows how out of touch the Government in this place have become?

[Patricia Gibson]

One would be forgiven for thinking of a real disconnect between those we seek to serve and those who serve. When that disconnect repeatedly happens, and this systematic failure perpetrates such injustice, it is a very bad day for democracy. The difference between this case and the contaminated blood and Horizon scandals —both were awful injustices—is that the Government at least appear to wish to take action on those scandals, albeit very slowly. They appear to wish to make moves to address those injustices. In this case, of changing the state pension age with little or no notice, with the devastating consequences that it has brought, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman has been moved to say:

“It is extremely rare that an organisation we investigate does not accept and act on our recommendations.”

It added that it has “no legal powers” to enforce compliance. A failure to comply with the ombudsman’s recommendations represents a constitutional gap in protecting the rights of citizens who have been failed by a public body, and in ensuring access to justice.

By laying this report, the PHSO has asked Parliament to intervene, to agree a mechanism for remedy and to hold the Government to account for its delivery. Here we are. We are holding the Government to account, while they and the incoming Labour Government enjoy a cosy “do nothing” consensus, sacrificing WASPI women on the bonfire of austerity that they have built together in a deliberate and conscious way.

For the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman to issue such a statement is unprecedented, but it illustrates how shocking it is that this Government, supported by the loyal Opposition—loyal in ways we could only imagine—appear to be trying to ignore, obfuscate and gaslight their way out of this crisis, and it is a crisis for the women impacted. Neither Labour nor the Tories in government have even accepted the principle of financial redress for WASPI women. How do I know that? Because when the Secretary of State made a statement shortly after the long-awaited publication of this report, he made no mention of redress or compensation, but instead listed how great it currently is to be a pensioner in the United Kingdom because of the sheer munificence of the UK Government. The shadow Secretary of State’s response to that statement studiously avoided mentioning compensation as well, instead delivering a patronising yet supine eulogy on treating pensioners with dignity. Empty words do not pay bills, and no one is fooled by that nonsense.

Perhaps we should not be too surprised, since Labour has a track record of letting women down, particularly working-class women. After all, the Labour administration in Glasgow City Council spent £2.5 million of taxpayers’ money fighting equal pay claims by female council workers over 10 years. That shows beyond any reasonable doubt just how far Labour was prepared to go to fight equal pay—an incredible waste of public money. It took an SNP administration in Glasgow council to ensure that legal action was stopped and the pay claims were settled. That was a priority of the incoming SNP administration.

We know that Labour has a track record of denying justice to women, so we cannot expect much from that quarter, and anybody who does will be disappointed. However, the WASPI women I have spoken to feel particularly betrayed by Labour MPs and MSPs, who have spent the last umpteen years posing for photographs, smiling broadly alongside WASPI campaigners and pledging what turned out to be empty words of support, only to abandon them at the very moment they were vindicated by the ombudsman.

The same debate was held last week in the Scottish Parliament. Incredibly, Labour MSPs—who are not just Members of the Scottish Parliament but members of the Scottish branch office—abstained, as ordered by their high command bosses in London, on a motion that called for higher compensation to properly reflect the financial harm suffered by WASPI women. That motion sounds pretty reasonable to me—it would to anybody.

The sums mentioned in the ombudsman’s report are simply too low. I think most people would agree with that. They must be considered in the context that the UK Government have saved £181.4 billion purely by raising the state pension age of these women. So it is time to get real. The UK Government could perhaps examine the private Member’s Bill brought forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown) and go from there. Instead, all we have is silence from both the UK Government and the Labour Opposition.

The Leader of the Opposition has himself benefited from a special law passed in Parliament: the Pensions Increase (Pension Scheme for Keir Starmer QC) Regulations 2013. It relates to when he was the Director of Public Prosecutions in England, and his personal pension is protected. It is quite literally one law for him and another law for everybody else, especially if you are a WASPI woman and even more so if you are a working-class woman. It does not escape anyone’s notice that the Leader of the Opposition is now very silent on the injustice suffered by WASPI women and supports less generous pensions for everyone else. What a brass neck. What shameful hypocrisy. Maybe he is just so cocksure of a thumping Labour majority at the next election that he thinks WASPI women are expendable. Who knows?

Meanwhile, around 280,000 WASPI women who have been impacted have died since the start of the WASPI campaign. Around 6,000 have died since the publication of the ombudsman report. Why is there no urgency to address this injustice? No wonder WASPI women’s impatience and sense of injustice is fast turning into outright fury. Who could blame them? Because of the evasions and mis-directions used in previous debates, I wish to say to the Minister that this is not a debate about returning the retirement age back to 60; this is not a debate about the triple lock; and this is not a debate about anything except the injustice suffered by women born in the 1950s who have been vindicated by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman.