ROS ALTMANN: There should be a hardship fund for Waspi women who suffered the most

Ros Altmann is a former Pensions Minister and now sits in the House of Lords.

The government has disappointed millions of ‘Waspi’ women by refusing to pay any of them, despite the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s finding that there was mismanagement in the way changes to the state pension age were communicated.

Many of these women, in their mid-60s and early 70s, are in serious trouble and I would like to see them get help.

But after the government also scrapped winter fuel payments without notice, pensioners are clearly not a priority.

The Women Against State Pension Inequality or Waspi campaign has been trying for years to get 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 any warning.

After the BackTo60 group lost a lawsuit alleging discrimination against women, the Waspi Campaign’s call for Parliamentary Ombudsman on maladministration continued and was finally found in their favor.

The Ombudsman’s March report recommended possible compensation of £1,000 to £2,950 per person to compensate for the mismanagement in the years around 2005, even though most women suffered no direct financial losses.

I never thought this recommendation was likely to happen as it would cost £3.5-10.5 billion.

The government says it cannot afford to pay billions of pounds to women to offset the rise in the state pension age.

So it doesn’t cost any of them a cent to recognize the problems.

Following the Chancellor’s terrible decision to take winter fuel payments away from almost all pensioners, including the very poorest who receive no pension credit, it has become clear that there is little sympathy for pensioners, who are simply not a priority for government spending.

The Parliamentary Ombudsman suspected that the government would reject his report.

He took the unusual step of putting it directly to Parliament because the Department for Work and Pensions has never accepted that it did anything seriously wrong or even apologized, let alone offered any compensation.

He was right to think there would be resistance to his recommendations.

I have never favored compensating every Waspi woman, but I still believe a hardship fund or access to early retirement credit would have been appropriate.

This is because I know that this matter was handled horribly by the DWP in the years between 2004 and 2009.

When I was Pensions Minister, I tried in 2015-2016 to persuade fellow ministers to acknowledge that there was mismanagement and introduce some kind of hardship scheme that the worst-affected women could claim.

I also suggested that using early access to pension credits would be a possible way forward for means-tested assistance. But there was no support for that.

I am a Waspi woman and would not want the taxpayer to compensate me personally because I knew about it.

But many clearly did not know and that is why I believe there is a strong moral case for the most affected women, who have suffered serious hardship, to be able to make a claim on a case-by-case basis. Unfortunately, this was also rejected by the government.

In its response to the Ombudsman, the government tries to justify refusing compensation to anyone by citing research showing that around three-quarters of women aged 45 to 54 knew in 2004 that their state pension age would rise.

But this still means that a quarter didn’t and they weren’t immediately notified.

The original increases were passed by parliament in 1995, proposing to raise the state pension age for women from 60 to 65 between 2010 and 2020.

The stated intention was to give at least fifteen years’ notice so that the women affected could plan ahead.

That would have been fair enough, but unfortunately the women were not properly informed about this important change in their future lives.

Even after 2004, when DWP surveys showed that so many women were unaware of the changes, there was no urgent communications campaign to let them know.

Indeed, letters were written telling them how much they could get 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 pushed through Parliament in 2011, I campaigned to delay the changes.

But unfortunately, the state pension increase for women to 65 years, and the second for men and women to 66 years, were both brought forward to 2018 and 2020 respectively, ultimately taking place in quick succession.

Some women who stopped working expecting retirement at age 60 were hit hard.

Women wrote to me explaining how they had made careful plans, given up work to care for their loved ones and calculated that their savings would last them until their state pension age.

They said that if the age were raised at such short notice, they would no longer have any money and that they could not go back to work now, but could have continued to work at the time if they had known.

The state pension is crucial for many women born in the 1950s.

They often had little chance to build up their own pension and if they started working part-time after having children, they were not even allowed to participate in their employer’s pension scheme.

Without the state pension they relied on, many fell into poverty.

It is now difficult to see a way forward for the Waspi women. Many of them are sick and had 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 would be for someone who is in serious hardship and could have made different decisions to protect his finances if he had known that he would not receive a state pension from the age of 60, to launch a judicial review of the response of the government. .

Without any of these, I’m afraid none of these women will get anything at all.