Labour is right not to pay compensation to the Waspi women – those who feel aggrieved that the state pension age for women was raised from 60 to 66 without, so they claim, them being given adequate information about the change. We are being invited to believe that tens of thousands of women drew up detailed plans for their retirement – all now undermined – without actually bothering to find out at what age they would retire.
You can’t claim poverty one moment while writing open-ended cheques for favoured groups the next
To swan off into state-funded retirement at 60 when life expectancy for women is now well into the 80s would be absurd. We can’t have a working age population supporting a retired population that consists of around a third of all adults. Moreover, all women have been asked to do is to work for as long as men have long had to do. Discrimination against women is no longer tolerated in pay and pensions; to prolong it when it is in favour of women would look ridiculous alongside that. Nor is it true that the change in pension age was sprung upon women without any announcement. It dominated the news when the decision was made by John Major’s government in 1995.
All that said, Labour figures have repeatedly suggested over the past few years that they would pay compensation if they succeeded in forming a government. Keir Starmer himself signed a pledge in 2022 promising that he would work towards compensation for women who had been meted out a ‘huge injustice’. When the parliamentary ombudsman suggested that Waspi women should be paid between £1,000 and £2,950 compensation each, Labour seized the moment, with future work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall posing with the campaign group. While there was nothing in Labour’s manifesto about compensation for Waspi women, they could be forgiven for thinking that voting Labour would earn it for them.
Moreover, last month Energy Secretary Ed Miliband announced that the government was going to increase mineworkers’ pensions by 32 per cent, or £29 a week, to compensate them for a deal in which their pension scheme was claimed to have been raided by the state. It is hard to argue why the government is so hard up when it comes to Waspi women but not with mineworkers. The government seems to operate on very different standards for its favoured client groups. It is just as it was when Rachel Reeves announced in July that public sector workers would receive fat pay rises – while simultaneously cutting the winter fuel payment on the grounds it was unaffordable, given the ‘black hole’ in the public finances.
You can’t claim poverty one moment while writing open-ended cheques for favoured groups the next. Reeves is right that the public finances are in a dreadful state, but she has undermined her case with above-inflation pay rises for public sector workers. It rather reaffirms the impression that this is a government which is set on a firm course for the rocks. Had it started out with a consistent message that there was no money in the kitty for above-inflation pay rises or for handouts to aggrieved groups, its decision this week to deny compensation for Waspi women would have earned it respect. As it is, it is one more piece of evidence that this is a government which cannot be trusted on anything.
Do the WASPI women deserve compensation? Katy Balls discusses with Isabel Hardman and Kate Andrews on the most recent Coffee House Shots podcast:
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