Waspi women report is damning and DWP must apologise, says ROS ALTMANN

Former pensions minister Ros Altmann is a long-time campaigner for older people’s rights and now sits in the House of Lords.

Here she responds to the call from the Parliamentary Ombudsman to Parliament to create a compensation system for women “Wasps” whose legal retirement age has been delayed.

Lady Altmann calls on the Department for Work and Pensions to admit its mistakes and recounts its difficulties in getting the issue of women’s rights understood. the state’s retirement age was taken seriously while he worked there as a minister between May 2015 and July 2016.

The long-awaited report from the parliamentary ombudsman on the government’s management of the increase in the legal retirement age for women has finally been published.

It’s overwhelming.

It highlights obvious failures and says millions of women must apologize, to acknowledge the impact on their retirement plans, but does not recommend the level of compensation that many women were hoping for. Waspi (Women Against Inequality) state pensions).

Sure, an apology would be a start, but it won’t pay the bills of those who are pushed into poverty because they don’t know their retirement age has been raised.

Nor will it address the distress, anger and anxiety of women born in the 1950s.

Although the Ombudsman report suggests possible compensation of between £500 and £3,000, it does not make specific recommendations to cover all Waspi women. And even these levels of overall compensation would cost taxpayers between £2 billion and £10 billion.

These are enormous sums and, because he believes that the DWP has not even acknowledged its failures, the Ombudsman places direct responsibility for what happened next on Parliament.

Of course, not all Waspi women deserve thousands of euros in compensation. Even the Ombudsman claims that many women knew about this increase and continued to work.

Others had private and public sector pensions they could rely on before their state pension started, but millions had no idea of ​​the delay.

In fact, in 2004, DWP surveys showed that a very large number of Waspi women did not know that their state pension age would not be 60. However, the DWP did not act for several more years. This is a serious failure that has caused significant harm to many women.

When I was a minister, it seemed that I was the only person in the DWP who believed that the issue of women’s pension ages should be taken seriously and that the Government’s failures had caused serious difficulties.

Having campaigned against the 2011 coalition government’s proposals to further raise women’s pension ages beyond the 1995 measures, I knew there were problems.

Unfortunately, Parliament has moved forward despite my calls and those of many others.

Accelerating increases after 2015 was unfair and the Waspi campaign began at that time.

Since then, the women have campaigned for compensation.

I was hoping to devise a plan that would allow those most affected to claim money to help them, but this was rejected by both my fellow ministers and the women themselves.

After the separate group BackTo60 lost its discrimination case at the High Court, the Parliamentary Ombudsman was able to consider the women’s appeals and his report marks the end of that process.

What happens next is entirely up to Parliament and I hope action will be swift. The first important thing is for the DWP to own up to its mistakes, apologize and ensure it has processes in place to prevent this from happening again.

Parliament must then decide what, if any, overall compensation will be offered and whether there will be a system to which those most affected will be eligible on a case-by-case basis.

But I fear Waspi campaigners, who hoped to receive several thousand pounds for each of the women born in the 1950s, will be disappointed.

Regardless, however, it must be done quickly, to put an end to this ongoing saga that has caused so much misery.

Having been ordered as a new minister not to even meet the people affected and that it was all about equality, I still tried to find a remedy and hoped to design a system that would allow the people most affected to seek compensation.

Perhaps early access to pension credit, but this was categorically rejected by everyone around me.

WASPI protest: Women gathered at the statue of political activist Mary Barbour in Glasgow to mark International Women’s Day earlier this month.

The Ombudsman’s report said some leaflets were published after the first round of pension age changes introduced by the Pensions Act 1995, but most women would not have seen them.

Perhaps ministers and civil servants assumed that women would somehow be informed of the change without being informed directly, and even though they only saw women around them with reaches the age of 60 start receiving their state pension.

This failure is seen as less egregious than the main finding, which was that even after the DWP knew from its surveys around 2004 that women born in the 1950s still believed they would receive their state pension at 60, he still hasn’t acted.

The DWP’s own policy states that information to the public must be targeted, but the department has never acknowledged its failure to properly inform women of what awaits them.

This failure to give women the important information they should have had is at the heart of the Ombudsman’s findings of maladministration.

However, he does not recommend that all those affected receive financial compensation. Regardless, however, it must be done quickly, to put an end to this ongoing saga that has caused so much misery.

I suspect there will now be a parliamentary inquiry, perhaps by the work and pensions select committee, and it will demand an apology and acknowledgment of failures.

This should not be a political issue. The real failures occurred first under the post-1997 Labor administration and then were compounded by the actions of the Coalition and the DWP Conservatives. A multi-stakeholder solution is therefore necessary and rapid. These women have waited long enough.