Women’s Changed State Pension Age: Compensation

Seamus Logan Excerpts

Wednesday 15th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Seamus Logan (Aberdeenshire North and Moray East) (SNP)]

Given that the Government response to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman report said that a compensation scheme would be “impractical”, with “significant challenges” and the potential for “unjustified payments”, and that there were significant concerns about the robustness of the Department for Work and Pensions research in 2006, does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the Government’s position is untenable, given the stark contrast with the way that sub-postmasters were treated?

[Sir John Hayes]

I do agree, and the hon. Gentleman will not be surprised to know that I shall be speaking later in my remarks about the ombudsman’s report and findings, which will bring me to the constitutional matter I raised about the nature of accountability and scrutiny and how Governments are held to account, and whether ombudsmen are meaningful at all if their conclusions are entirely disregarded. He is right to raise that issue.

I want briefly to describe the events that provoked me to challenge the previous Government on this issue when my party held the reins of power. I am not a recent convert to this cause; I made the same argument then—that we needed to recognise the justice of this campaign and act accordingly—but I did so knowing the events that have occurred.

I will not go over things laboriously—because you would not want me to, Dr Murrison, given the number of Members who want to speak in this debate—but essentially, when pension ages were equalised, which was the result of two Acts of Parliament, the notice given to the people affected was inadequate.

I am not an unbridled advocate of the case that every woman who thought that they were going to retire at 60, and then found that they would have to retire at 65, should be compensated. If a woman was young or middle-aged when that happened, there is a fair case that they had time to adjust—they could re-prepare; they could make different plans.

However, if a woman was born in the 1950s and had anticipated retiring in two, three or four years’ time but then had to work up to five years’ longer, it is a very different matter, because many of those women, anticipating their retirement, had prepared for exactly that eventuality. Many of those women, of course, were no longer working. They had ended work to look after elderly parents; they were playing a caring role; or their skills were no longer relevant to the workplace, because they had taken time out of work, first to have children and then, as I have said, to embark on other social responsibilities. These were women who worked hard and had done the right thing, and they are not all, as they are sometimes characterised by their critics, drawn from the liberal bourgeoisie—who, as you know, Dr Murrison, I generally speaking despise.