Here’s a reminder of @JosephineCumbo’s research showing the excellent job done by the national press in communicating rises to women’s state pension age. It must have been very hard to miss the extensive coverage. #WASPI https://t.co/eFSD66zwfx
— Moira O’Neill (@MoiraONeill) March 21, 2024
The reaction of the national press to the news that a Parliamentary Ombudsman is recommending that WASPI women are compensated is along the lines of my blog’s headline yesterday
The Daily Express, a usual ally of Rishi Sunak’s current administration were most passionate of all, accusing the DWP of shirking responsibility and hiding behind rhetoric.
WASPI outrage as DWP makes ‘dignified’ pension claim – and why it still hasn’t paid out
The role of the press, both as Jo Cumbo’s submission reports and as yesterday’s headlines confirm, has been more significant than the role of the DWP’s communication’s team and that is a big part of this story.
In as much as WASPI have won the battle, it is a limited win. They have convinced the Ombudsman that the DWP did not properly do its job and though the press did what it could, the WASPI women were ill-informed , ill-prepared and deserve compensation from the public purse. This is not a story about pension equalisation at this moment, if the Government were to repay the gain it has made by equalising pensions the bill would top £100bn and it is growing every day.
“Let’s pay the price of WASPI”
What is the price of WASPI women, the price is in excess of £30bn – unaffordable to a Government which has just slashed £59bn from their backstop capital, by cutting National Insurance.
The Ombudsman is recommending compensation of between £3bn and £10bn.
The range of compensation suggests two things to me
- There is a range of views on just what warning the WASPI women got
- There is a range of views on how much damage the lack of communication caused.
The lower end of the Ombudsman’s recommendation is only 10% of what WASPI is demanding and even the higher end less than a third.
If 100% isn’t affordable, then 10% is. The question moves on from whether the price should be paid but “what is the price?”.
The Government will hope that the WASPI issue will go out with the tide as it came in. They will hope that WASPI has had its day in parliament and that the public interest will recede with time and distance from the headlines.
WASPI, which has precious little leverage on the DWP , other than publicity around the Ombudsman’s report, is now dependent on keeping its campaign going.
It is competing against other claims on Government, they range from the Steelworkers pension redress to “infected blood” to most notably the injustice done to Post Office managers.
The DWP are clearly playing a “wait and see” game, trying to gauge how much of the WASPI support is based on society’s support and it has some good benchmarks. It cannot be seen to buying votes and , since the WASPI issue is a cross-party clusterfuck, the public can’t really put the blame for this on any one party. The Labour party and Conservative party do not want to commit to a compensation scheme till they are clear how real this outrage is – beyond the campaign itself.
The WASPI campaign is now about keeping the Ombudsman’s report in the public eye and the Government’s case for paying nothing is best put by saying nothing. Which is a little ironic, bearing in mind how the claim has arisen.
Apart from extensive newspaper coverage, many members of occupational schemes received at least annual newsletters/member reports which almost certainly would have included topical news items, such as State Pension changes. I wrote some of them.
I have sympathy for anyone impacted by retrospective legislation which ‘moved the goal posts’, but equality between the sexes was essential, and I remember women (and men) being forced to retire at abritary retirement ages, often 60 in public sector schemes, for both sexes.
The rigidity of State Pension rules spawned innovations in occupational schemes with ‘bridging’ pensions which paid higher pensions prior to State Pension Age (reduced after). These ‘smoothing’ pensions were popular when communicated, but often trustees did not promote them, especially where confidence in administrators to apply the reduction at SPA might be lacking.