The Waspi women won’t be compensated any time soon

If the ‘Waspi women’ (women against state pension inequality) were hoping that last week’s ombudsman report into the maladministration of the change to their pension age would lead to swift compensation, they will have been sorely disappointed by the government response yesterday. There wasn’t really a proper response to speak of, with Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride giving MPs what he described as an ‘interim update’ on the investigation. Neither, though, was there a call from the opposition for the government to get on and pay the compensation recommended by the parliamentary and health service ombudsman.

Stride spent some time correcting what he called ‘inaccurate and misleading commentary since the report was published’. He pointed out that the ombudsman had not in fact examined the decision to raise the state pension age for women to match that of men, but that ‘the report hinges on the department’s decisions over a narrow period between 2005 and 2007, and on the effect of those decisions on individual notifications’.

He added that not all women born in the 1950s will have been adversely affected ‘as many women were aware that the state pension age had been changed’. He claimed that the DWP had ‘fully co-operated with the ombudsman’s investigation’. He neglected to mention, though, that the report had also said the department had ‘clearly indicated’ it would refuse to comply with the recommendations, hence its request that parliament ‘intervene and hold the department to account’.

Stride did promise ‘our commitment to the full and proper consideration of the ombudsman’s report’. But given he pointed out that the ombudsman had taken five years to compile its verdict, he seemed to be limbering up for a rather lengthy full consideration: one which may go beyond the next election.

That length of time in responding was one of the points Labour’s Liz Kendall took issue with. The shadow work and pensions secretary asked when Stride would update the House again after Easter recess. She also asked whether he would commit to ‘laying all the relevant information about this issue, including all impact assessments and related correspondence, in the House of Commons library so that lessons can be learned and so that Members across the House can properly do their job’.

Kendall told MPs that her party was committed to providing information about any future changes to the state pension age in a ‘timely and targeted way’, and asked if the government would do the same. The one thing she didn’t ask for was if, and when, the government would be paying compensation.

Louise Perry and I discussed the problems with paying compensation to the Waspi women on a recent Coffee House Shots podcast. It is undoubtedly hard for younger generations, who are sceptical about whether they’ll ever retire, to sympathise that strongly with the group as a whole. But the episode does show that there is a cognitive disconnect in Westminster between the civil servants and politicians who were working on this change and the women who were affected. The politicians and civil servants involved enjoy a generous pension as part of their jobs and are also generally from a generation with a less static view of the retirement age, while many of the women affected come from a working class background and saw retirement age as something you wouldn’t question. They had no more reason to check whether it was changing than a teenager might check when they could take their driving test.

There are undoubtedly lessons for better governing. The problem with paying compensation, though, is that the Waspi women are vying with the victims of the contaminated blood scandal and the Post Office Horizon miscarriage of justice. It might be unfair to make the comparison had it not been one volunteered by senior Waspi campaigners themselves last week. Given ministers and officials have taken an absurd amount of time to respond to people who watched their children die in agony or who have had their entire lives blighted by HIV and Hepatitis, and those who went to jail because an organisation couldn’t admit to its own faulty IT system, it is hard to see how the Waspi women will get ahead of other victims of far greater injustices.