Ros Altmann is a former pensions minister who now sits in the House of Lords.
The Government has let millions of ‘Waspi’ women down by refusing to pay them anything, despite the Parliamentary Ombudsman finding maladministration in the way changes to the state pension age were communicated.
Many of these women, between 60 and 70 years old, are in serious difficulties and I would have liked to see them helped.
But after the Government also scrapped winter fuel payments without warning, it is clear that pensioners are not a priority.
The Women against inequality in state pensions or Waspi campaign has been trying for years to obtain compensation for women born in the 1950s.
They believe they were treated unfairly when their state pension age was raised from 60 to 65, and then to 66, without adequate notice.
Lady Altmann: When I was Pensions Minister, I tried to persuade my fellow ministers to set up a support scheme to which the worst-affected women could claim
After the group BackTo60 lost a court case claiming that women were discriminated against, the Waspi campaign’s appeal to the Parliamentary Ombudsman on maladministration he went ahead and finally ruled in his favor.
The Ombudsman’s report in March recommended possible compensation of £1,000 to £2,950 each, to make up for mismanagement during the years around 2005, even though most women suffered no direct financial loss.
I never believed this recommendation would happen as it would cost between £3.5bn and £10.5bn.
The Government says it cannot afford to pay billions of pounds to women to offset the rise in the state pension age.
Therefore, it will not cost any of them a cent to recognize the problems.
Following the Chancellor’s appalling decision to withdraw winter fuel payments from almost all pensioners, including the poorest who do not receive pension credits, it has become clear that there is little sympathy for pensioners, who are simply not a priority for public spending.
The Parliamentary Ombudsman suspected that the Government would reject his report.
He took the unusual step of raising the matter directly in Parliament, because the Department for Work and Pensions never accepted that it had done anything seriously wrong or apologized, let alone offered any compensation.
He was right to believe there would be resistance to his recommendations.
I was never in favor of compensating all Waspi women, but I still believe that a hardship fund or early access to pension credit would have been right.
This is because I know that this issue was handled terribly by the DWP in the years between 2004 and 2009.
When I was Pensions Minister, I tried to persuade my fellow ministers in 2015-2016 to recognize that there had been maladministration and set up some kind of hardship scheme that the most affected women could claim against.
I also suggested that using early access to pension credit was a possible way forward for means-tested help. But there was no support for this.
I’m a Waspi woman and I wouldn’t want taxpayers to compensate me personally because I knew that.
But it is clear that many did not know this and therefore I believe that there is a strong moral argument for the most affected women, who have suffered serious hardship, to be able to complain on a case-by-case basis. Unfortunately, this has also been rejected by the Government.
In its response to the Ombudsman, the Government attempts to justify denying compensation to anyone by citing a survey showing that around three quarters of women aged 45 to 54 in 2004 knew that their state pension age would increase.
But this still means that a quarter did not do so and were not informed immediately.
The original increases were passed by Parliament in 1995, proposing to increase the state pension age for women from 60 to 65, between 2010 and 2020.
The stated intention was to provide at least 15 years’ notice so that affected women could plan for the future.
That would have been fair enough, but unfortunately the women were not adequately informed about this important change in their future life.
Even after 2004, when DWP surveys showed that so many women were unaware of the changes, there was no urgent communications campaign to inform them.
In fact, letters were written telling them how much they could receive from their state pension, without telling them that they would receive nothing at age 60.
When the second increase in the state pension age was passed in Parliament in 2011, I campaigned to stop the changes.
But unfortunately the increase in the state pension for women at age 65, and the second for men and women at age 66, were brought forward to 2018 and 2020 respectively, so they ended up happening in quick succession.
Some women who stopped working because they expected to receive their pension at age 60 were severely affected.
Raising the state pension age: The Women Against State Pension Inequality campaign has been trying for years to get compensation for women born in the 1950s
Women wrote to me explaining how they had made careful plans, giving up work to care for their loved ones, calculating that their savings could last them until state pension age.
They said they would be out of money if the age was raised so quickly and they would not be able to go back to work now, but they could have continued working at that time if they had known.
The state pension is crucial for many women born in the 1950s.
They often had little chance of setting up private pensions, and if they worked part-time after having children, they were not even allowed to join their employer’s pension scheme.
Without receiving the state pension they depended on, many were plunged into poverty.
It is difficult to see any way forward for Waspi women now. Many of them are sick and hoped to be treated better.
One way would be for MPs to insist that they are not happy with this decision, and I don’t see that happening!
The only other way could be for someone who is suffering serious hardship and could have made different decisions to protect their finances if they had known they would not receive their state pension from the age of 60, to launch a judicial review of the Government’s response. .
Without any of these, I’m afraid none of these women will get anything at all.
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