Waspi women deserve justice over the pensions scandal

Blunders happen in all bureaucracies, and the Department for Work and Pensions, and its previous incarnations, are no exception.

However, the scale of the financial and emotional damage wreaked on the Women Against State Pension Inequality – the so-called Waspi women – effectively robbed of a very large proportion of their state pension, is both wide and grievous. Every woman born between 1950 and 1960 – some 3.6 million individuals – has suffered a toll on their standard of living, and in some cases where their health has been adversely affected, the full costs involved are incalculable.

The report of the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO), an independent watchdog, is damning and places the responsibility for the fiasco on the state. Unusually, it directly calls for parliament to remedy matters, given the long-term reluctance of successive administrations to make amends.

The urgency arises not only from the length of time the scandal has dragged on already – the Waspi pressure group has been campaigning for justice since 2015 – but from the fact that many of those seeking justice are already in their seventies.

The bureaucratic delays now certainly feel cynical. Were smaller sums of money involved, the claims would surely have been settled long ago. But because the cost to the Treasury runs into many billions of pounds, it seems to be taking the government an inordinately long time to issue even the most modest forms of restitution.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) seems to be justifying the ombudsman’s suspicions by issuing a non-committal and deeply disappointing holding response to the report: “We will consider the ombudsman’s report and respond in due course, having cooperated fully throughout this investigation. The government has always been committed to supporting all pensioners in a sustainable way that gives them a dignified retirement, whilst also being fair to them and taxpayers.”

That is obviously not good enough and raises the fear that the DWP will delay and delay until there is a change of government, and the Labour Party has to deal with the problem. That is hardly “doing the right thing”, and particularly offensive is the way that the DWP pits taxpayers against the Waspi women, as if they were two equally valid sides in some dispute.

They are not – the state is clearly in the wrong, and the question of fairness has been adjudicated by the PHSO. It will certainly cost the taxpayer money, but that is not the fault of the Waspi women – and the state, and taxpayers, have been enjoying the savings on the retirement pension budget for some decades.

All the Waspi women demand is their money and some compensation. The facts are not in doubt, and none of this is their fault. The DWP and its predecessors failed to send letters to the people affected in good time and only informed them of these often life-changing decisions when they were close to their expected eligibility for the state pension, and therefore far too late to make alternative provision.

The DWP has had plenty of time to make contingencies and should wait no longer. Indeed, the compensation suggested by the PHSO is, if anything, on the lower end of what would be a just conclusion to this affair.

The Waspi campaigners have suggested a figure of around £10,000 in compensation for each person affected, but the ombudsman’s report instead recommends payouts of between £1,000 and £2,950. That would cost the Treasury between £3.5bn and £10.5bn overall, depending on the pattern of claims.

Yet the PHSO report also details how the consequences of the DWP’s initial blunders reverberated through people’s lives, with staggering effects. There are instances of women saying they suffered financial losses in the tens of thousands of pounds, and another who lost £442,000 in salary because she’d retired in the expectation of a state pension that wasn’t going to transpire for many more years. She was unable to get her old job back or find work, a common complaint in this age group.

So it might actually be in the interests of the DWP to accept the PHSO recommendations immediately and end the saga now. The alternative might be further campaigning through the courts and an even bigger bill at the end of it.

There are some striking parallels here with the plight of the subpostmasters and their struggle for justice against indifferent officialdom. Maybe the Waspi women should persuade ITV to make a drama of their heartbreaking stories.