Women affected by change in state pension age ‘are owed compensation’, report finds
A long-awaited report on how women born in the 1950s were affected by increases to their retirement age has recommended they are owed compensation.
An investigation by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) found that thousands of women may have been adversely impacted by the government’s failure to adequately inform them of the change.
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To date, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has not acknowledged its failings or put things right for those women, the watchdog said.
The ombudsman noted that the department has indicated it will not comply with the findings and called on parliament to intervene.
PHSO chief executive Rebecca Hilsenrath, said: ”The UK’s national ombudsman has made a finding of failings by DWP in this case and has ruled that the women affected are owed compensation.
“DWP has clearly indicated that it will refuse to comply. This is unacceptable. The department must do the right thing and it must be held to account for failure to do so. ”
Ms Hilsenrath said that given the ombudsman’s “significant concerns” the DWP will not act on its findings, “we have proactively asked parliament to intervene and hold the department to account”.
She said: “Parliament now needs to act swiftly, and make sure a compensation scheme is established. We think this will provide women with the quickest route to remedy.”
The prime minister’s official spokesman said the government would now “consider the ombudsman’s report and respond to their recommendations formally in due course”.
A DWP spokesman echoed the response, adding: “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.
“The state pension is the foundation of income in retirement and will remain so as we deliver a further 8.5% rise in April which will increase the state pension for 12 million pensioners by £900.”
The findings follow a long-running campaign by the Women Against State Pension Inequality – often known as Waspi women.
The group say millions suffered financially as they were not given sufficient warning to prepare for the change to their retirement age.
The ombudsman’s report suggested that, in the sample cases it has seen, women should receive compensation of between £1,000 and £2,950 – Level 4 on the compensation scale.
However, the findings are not legally binding.
Waspi women ‘very disappointed’ in DWP
Angela Madden, chair of Waspi, told Sky News she wanted to see the government grant Level 6 compensation of £10,000 or more.
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Is Waspi compensation good enough?
While this would cost the exchequer around £36bn, she said the government “have saved £181bn by increasing the state pension age” for women.
“Had they told us, when they first decided in 1995 this was going to happen, we would have had 15 years notice,” she said.
“I got a letter in March 2012, two years before I expected to retire, and that letter told me I wasn’t getting my state pension until March 2020. I was absolutely devastated.
“I’d already given up work to spend time with my then ailing mother. I couldn’t unmake that decision and had [I] had the right information. I wouldn’t have made that decision.”
She added that she is “very disappointed in the DWP” and called on whoever wins the next election to act swiftly on compensation.
“It needs to happen soon as more than 270,000 women have died since we started this campaign”, she said.
Why was the state pension age changed for women?
The state pension age was aligned to match men in a move praised for improving gender equality.
For decades, men had retired at 65 while women had retired at 60.
A law was passed in 1995 setting out a timetable to eventually raise the retirement age for women so it would match the age for men.
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The original plan was to phase in the change over a 10-year period between 2010 and 2020 to allow people sufficient time to plan ahead.
However, in 2011 the coalition government accelerated the shift to reduce costs, with the increase in retirement age brought forward to 2018.
Waspi agrees with the equalisation of ages, but says they were not properly informed of the changes, giving them insufficient time to prepare or make other financial arrangements.
The ombudsman investigated complaints that, since 1995, the DWP has failed to provide accurate, adequate and timely information about areas of state pension reform.
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It published stage one of its investigation in July 2021, which found failings in the way the department communicated changes to women’s state pension age.
The DWP’s handling of the pension age changes meant some women lost opportunities to make informed decisions about their finances and diminished their sense of personal autonomy and financial control, the ombudsman said.
Liberal Democrat Chief Whip Wendy Chamberlain said Waspi women have “tirelessly campaigned for justice after being left out of pocket”.
She added: “Liberal Democrats have long supported Waspi in their campaign and it is now up to this Conservative government to come forward with a plan to get these women the compensation they are owed.”
Politics
Specialist teams and online investigators deployed across England and Wales to tackle ‘national emergency’ of violence against women and girls
Specialist investigation teams for rape and sexual offences are to be created across England and Wales as the home secretary declares violence against women and girls a “national emergency”.
Shabana Mahmood said the dedicated units will be in place across every force by 2029 as part of Labour’s violence against women and girls (VAWG) strategy due to be launched later this week.
The use of Domestic Abuse Protection Orders (DAPOs), which had been trialled in several areas, will also be rolled out across England and Wales. They are designed to target abusers by imposing curfews, electronic tags and exclusion zones.
The orders cover all forms of domestic abuse, including economic abuse, coercive and controlling behaviour, stalking and ‘honour’-based abuse. Breaching the terms can carry a prison term of up to five years.
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Govt ‘thinking again’ on abuse strategy
Nearly £2m will also be spent funding a network of officers to target offenders operating within the online space.
Teams will use covert and intelligence techniques to tackle violence against women and girls via apps and websites.
A similar undercover network funded by the Home Office to examine child sexual abuse has arrested over 1,700 perpetrators.
Abuse is ‘national emergency’
Ms Mahmood said in a statement: “This government has declared violence against women and girls a national emergency.
“For too long, these crimes have been considered a fact of life. That’s not good enough. We will halve it in a decade.
“Today, we announce a range of measures to bear down on abusers, stopping them in their tracks. Rapists, sex offenders and abusers will have nowhere to hide.”
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The target to halve violence against women and girls in a decade is a Labour manifesto pledge.
The government said the measures build on existing policy, including facial recognition technology to identify offenders, improving protections for stalking victims, making strangulation a criminal offence and establishing domestic abuse specialists in 999 control rooms.
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Labour has ‘failed women’
But the Conservatives said Labour had “failed women” and “broken its promises” by delaying the publication of the violence against women and girls strategy.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said that Labour “shrinks from uncomfortable truths, voting against tougher sentences and presiding over falling sex-offender convictions. At every turn, Labour has failed women”.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will be on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips on Sky News this morning from 8.30am.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published a crypto wallet and custody guide investor bulletin on Friday, outlining best practices and common risks of different forms of crypto storage for the investing public.
The SEC’s bulletin lists the benefits and risks of different methods of crypto custody, including self-custody versus allowing a third-party to hold digital assets on behalf of the investor.
If investors choose third-party custody, they should understand the custodian’s policies, including whether it “rehypothecates” the assets held in custody by lending them out or if the service provider is commingling client assets in a single pool instead of holding the crypto in segregated customer accounts.
Crypto wallet types were also outlined in the SEC guide, which broke down the pros and cons of hot wallets, which are connected to the internet, and offline storage in cold wallets.
Hot wallets carry the risk of hacking and other cybersecurity threats, according to the SEC, while cold wallets carry the risk of permanent loss if the offline storage fails, a storage device is stolen, or the private keys are compromised.
The SEC’s crypto custody guide highlights the sweeping regulatory change at the agency, which was hostile to digital assets and the crypto industry under former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s leadership.
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The crypto community celebrates the SEC guide as a transformational change in the agency
“The same agency that spent years trying to kill the industry is now teaching people how to use it,” Truth For the Commoner (TFTC) said in response to the SEC’s crypto custody guide.
The SEC is providing “huge value” to crypto investors by educating prospective crypto holders about custody and best practices, according to Jake Claver, the CEO of Digital Ascension Group, a company that provides services to family offices.
SEC regulators published the guide one day after SEC Chair Paul Atkins said that the legacy financial system is moving onchain.
On Thursday, the SEC gave the green light to the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a clearing and settlement company, to begin tokenizing financial assets, including equities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and government debt securities.
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Greens leader Zack Polanski has rejected claims his party would push for open borders on immigration, telling Sky News it is “not a pragmatic” solution for a world in “turmoil”.
Mr Polanski distanced himself from his party’s “long-range vision” for open borders, saying it was not in his party’s manifesto and was an “attack line used by opponents” to question his credibility.
It came as Mr Polanski, who has overseen a spike in support in the polls to double figures, refused to apologise over controversial comments he made about care workers on BBC Question Time that were criticised across the political spectrum.
Mr Polanski was speaking to Sky News earlier this week while in Calais, where he joined volunteers and charities to witness how French police handle the arrival of migrants in the town that is used as a departure point for those wanting to make the journey to the UK.
He told Sky News he had made the journey to the French town – once home to the “Jungle” refugee camp before it was demolished in 2016 – to tackle “misinformation” about migration and to make the case for a “compassionate, fair and managed response” to the small boats crisis.
He said that “no manifesto ever said anything about open borders” and that the Greens had never stood at a general election advocating for them.
“Clearly when the world is in political turmoil and we have deep inequality, that is not a situation we can move to right now,” he said.
“That would also involve massive international agreements and cooperation. That clearly is not a pragmatic conversation to have right now. And very often the government try to push that attack line to make us look not pragmatic.”
The party’s manifesto last year did not mention open borders, but it did call for an end to the “hostile environment”, more safe and legal routes and for the Home Office to be abolished and replaced with a department of migration.
Asked why the policy of minimal restrictions on migration had been attributed to his party, Mr Polanski said open borders was part of a “long-range vision of what society could look like if there was a Green government and if we’d had a long time to fix some of the systemic problems”.
‘We should recognise the contribution migrants make’
Mr Polanski, who was elected Green Party leader in September and has been compared to Nigel Farage over his populist economic policies, said his position was one of a “fair and managed” migration system – although he did not specify whether that included a cap on numbers.
He acknowledged that there needed to be a “separate conversation” about economic migration but that he did not believe any person who boarded a small boat was in a “good situation”.
While Mr Polanski stressed that he believed asylum seekers should be able to work in Britain and pay taxes, he also said he believed in the need to train British workers in sectors such as care, where one in five are foreign nationals.
Asked what his proposals for a fair and managed migration system looked like, and whether he supported a cap on numbers, Mr Polanski said: “We have 100,000 vacancies in the National Health Service. One in five care workers in the care sector are foreign nationals.
Zack Polanski speaks to Sky News from a warehouse in Calais where charities and organisations provide migrants with essentials.
“Now, of course, that is both British workers and we should be training British workers, but we should recognise the contribution that migrants and people who come over here make.”
I’m not going to apologise’
Mr Polanski also responded to the criticism he attracted over his comments about care workers on Question Time last week, where he told the audience: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum” – before adding: “I’m very grateful for the people who do this work.”
His comments have been criticised by a number of Labour MPs, including Wes Streeting, the health secretary, who said: “Social care isn’t just ‘wiping someone’s bum’. It is a hard, rewarding, skilled professional job.
“This is immigration as exploitation.”
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Asked whether he could understand why some care workers might feel he had talked down to them, the Greens leader replied: “I care deeply about care workers. When I made those comments, it’s important to give a full context. I said ‘I’m very grateful to people who do this important work’ and absolutely repeat that it’s vital work.”
“Of course, it is not part of the whole job, and I never pretended it was part of the whole job.”
Mr Polanski said he “totally” rejected the suggestion that he had denigrated the role of care workers in the eyes of the public and said his remarks were made in the context of a “hostile Question Time” where he had “three right-wing panellists shouting at me”.
Pressed on whether he wanted to apologise, he replied: “I’m not going to apologise for being really clear that I’m really grateful to the people who do this really vital work. And yes, we should be paying them properly, too.”
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