The “Waspi women” – a group of campaigners who have since 2015 argued for compensation for money they lost as a result of changes to the state pension age – were defeated this week. On Tuesday (17 December) the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, announced that the government would not be paying them any compensation, in spite of a recommendation from the parliamentary ombudsman that they should receive up to £2,950 each. For a government with almost no fiscal headroom and a desperate need to fix ailing public services, the £10.5bn cost of offering such compensation was simply unaffordable.
The decision has been met with furious denunciations of betrayal and broken promises. But the real villains here are the people who have used the Waspi women’s cause for their own political gain, such as the novelty Christmas singer, theme park attendee and occasional Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey. The complaint of the Waspis is that the change to the state pension age (from 60 to 65) that was first planned in 1993 was supposed to happen gradually between 2010 and 2020. Under the austerity plans of the 2010 coalition government, however, the change was abruptly brought forward to 2018, with the result that an estimated 3.7 million women born in the 1950s lost up to six years of state pension. Ed Davey was a government minister at the time this decision was made. He did not speak up against the 2011 Pensions Bill in any of the debates on it. When Labour MPs proposed an amendment that would have given women born in the 1950s more notice and shorter waits to receive their pension, Davey voted against it.
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