Women’s State Pension Age: Ombudsman Report

Sara Britcliffe Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Peter Aldous]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that point, which he makes quite well. I am diverting slightly from the main cause and theme, but I think he and I are on the same page.

As I said, I am concerned about repeated failures in the Department’s communications. Only last Saturday, a constituent highlighted to me how the introduction of the new state pension penalises those women born in 1951 and 1952. The End Frozen Pensions campaign points out that 85% of frozen pensioners did not know of the policy’s existence prior to moving abroad.

[Sara Britcliffe (Hyndburn) (Con)]

On that point, will my hon. Friend give way?

[Peter Aldous]

Very briefly, because this is a side issue.

[Sara Britcliffe]

The report acknowledges that the DWP is now modernising its system so that people are informed, but does he agree that moving to a modernised system might pose a risk, specifically to pensioners who are digitally excluded, that something similar could happen again in future?

[Peter Aldous]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. It is a side point to the main point, but nevertheless the PHSO has pinpointed that issue. These are debates for another day. I suspect the right hon. Member for East Ham and his Committee need to look at these issues in more detail, but the PHSO has shone a spotlight on a wider problem.

The aims of the APPG that I co-chair with the hon. Member for Salford and Eccles are threefold: first, to represent those women who have been treated unjustly by the short-notice changes to the state pension age, 280,000 of whom have died, according to WASPI, since the start of the campaign; secondly, to develop and promote policy solutions to support 1950s-born women and their families who do not have access to their pension and are facing mental and physical health consequences; and thirdly, to feed the views and experiences of 1950s-born women into future policy decisions relating to state pensions and welfare.

Over the years, the APPG has had regular evidence-gathering sessions with various representative groups, and we have considered policies and initiatives to best help and assist them. In January 2022, the APPG made its own submission to the PHSO about the level of compensation that should be provided. I give special thanks to the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish for the work that he and his office did putting that together. Based on the evidence presented to us from across the UK, we reached what, for us, was the logical conclusion that level 6 of the PHSO’s compensation scale should apply. Subsequently, we refined that recommendation by proposing that compensation should be provided in a bell curve, with those who received least notice of the longest postponement receiving the most compensation, and those who received longer notice of shorter increase receiving lesser sums.