Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) has launched a crowdjustice appeal to raise money for a judicial challenge in the High Court against the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO), alleging irregularities in his probe into the DWP’s failure to disclose changes to state pension age.
In order to appeal the Ombudsman’s judgement in the first instance, the campaign is launching a crowd justice funding drive to raise £100,000 in funds.
The Ombudsman’s investigation, which was first initiated in October 2018, looked at the evidence from six cases of women born in the 1950s affected by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) failing to notify them that their state pension age had increased from 60 to 65 and then 66.
In his first report in Summer 2021, the Ombudsman found that there had been maladministration on the part of the DWP, stating: “- affected women should have had at least 28 months’ more individual notice of the changes. For women who were not aware of the changes, the opportunity that additional notice would have given them to adjust their retirement plans was lost. The next stage of our investigation will consider the impact that injustice had.”
The Ombudsman came to the conclusion that women should have received explicit letters informing them of the changes to the state pension age starting in December 2006. If that had occurred, the majority of the impacted women would have been aware of the changes by 2009.
WASPI says the Ombudsman, however, seems to think that most women would not have gotten these letters until much later than 2009, by which time it would have been too late for most of them to make new decisions and take financial security measures.
WASPI says: “The Ombudsman is therefore mistaken about the impact the DWP’s maladministration has had on WASPI women. The Ombudsman is also wrong about what women should have to do to prove that they suffered financial losses because of the DWP’s maladministration. WASPI believe that the Ombudsman’s mistaken approach to injustice could mean many women – perhaps hundreds of thousands – receiving less compensation than they otherwise would.”
Women Against State Pension Inequality WASPI campaign chair Angela Madden says: “Millions of women have been waiting years for justice and the latest findings from the Ombudsman have left us feeling insulted and ignored.
“Now we have to fight back so we are urging people to donate whatever they can to our legal fund. The money is ringfenced for use to defend ourselves against the Ombudsman’s mistakes and put them right so his investigation can be concluded on a proper footing. Every penny will take us a step closer to justice for 1950s-born women.”
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