3. What discussions has the First Minister had with the UK Government regarding the underpayment of pensions to women by the Department for Work and Pensions? OQ56575

Can I thank Joyce Watson for that very important question? We have repeatedly and clearly relayed our concerns to the UK Government on state pension issues relating to women. I once again urge the DWP to resolve the historical underpayment of state pension to women as quickly as possible. 

We know that the underpayment of the state pension to an estimated 200,000 married women has spanned more than 20 years, and it has particularly impacted women who had a poor state pension in their own right. They were entitled to claim 60 per cent state pension based on their husband’s pension contributions. What is particularly scandalous about this error is that many of those women may not be able to claim the full amount that was underpaid to them. Women whose husbands retired before 2008 and hadn’t applied to the DWP for an increase in their pensions will only be entitled to claim a 12-month backpayment. The UK Government, of course, is saying that they wrote to those women informing them of that rule change. However, like in the Women Against State Pension Inequality scandal, many women have said they did not receive that letter. And as a WASPI woman myself, I can tell you I didn’t receive those claim letters either. First Minister, what assessment has the Welsh Government made about the impact of this significant underpayment on those women in Wales and, of course, that lost income to Wales?

Thanks very much to Joyce Watson. She set out the position, I thought, very clearly indeed. The DWP claim that women whose husbands turned 65 before 17 March 2008 were written to, and it was their responsibility to make a claim for the uplift. And yet, as more is known about all of this, it becomes clearer and clearer that that was not the case many, many times. There is evidence that the DWP, for example, wrote to the husbands of people rather than to women themselves, and those letters may never, ever have got to the people who were required to make the claim. It would be, I think, a gesture of good faith on behalf of the DWP that they would be willing to backdate those claims further than the standard 12 months. Of course, where the DWP itself was at fault—and it was at fault, we now know, in many thousands of cases—then the payments will be backdated to the time at which the claim first would have been effective.

Here in Wales, we don’t yet have the detailed information, through the DWP, of the number of women who’ve been directly affected. What we do know, Llywydd, is that the group in our population least likely to take up the benefits to which they are entitled is single women aged over 75, and that’s been the case for many years, and across many different types of benefits. We know for sure that the people who are most likely to have been adversely affected by all of this are the people who were least likely to have been in a position to put that right. So, we start from a very difficult place. We have, as Baroness Altmann, the Conservative former pensions Minister, said, an underclass of often elderly female pensioners emerging who are living on far less than they should be. Jane Hutt, in the previous Senedd, wrote to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman urging that office to prioritise the complaints received from women in this position, to try to expedite a resolution of this matter, and Welsh Ministers will continue to take up the cases of Welsh individuals who find themselves in this awful position.

First Minister, I understand that the UK Government is fully committed and has ploughed a lot of money recently into making sure that women across the country who have been affected by these areas receive the money that they are rightly owed. Can the Minister provide an update on what steps the Welsh Government are taking to make sure that women across Wales are aware, particularly that vulnerable group of over-75s that you just mentioned? How are you reaching out to them to make sure that they know that this process is ongoing and that it isn't a scam? Are you as a Government working constructively with the UK Government to rectify the situation, using some of the things that you just suggested?

Well, Llywydd, of course the Welsh Government acts to make sure that women in Wales are aware of the rights that they have. Her party, of course, went into the last election saying that it would withdraw all the money that the Welsh Government spends on non-devolved responsibilities. And what she's just asked me to do is quite certainly not a responsibility that rests with this Senedd or with the Welsh Government. Fortunately, we didn't take her party's advice. So, the single advice fund that we have put together last year helped 127,000 people dealing with nearly 300,000 welfare benefit issues, and as a result of the investment that we made, an additional £43 million has come into Wales in unclaimed benefits. In March this year, Llywydd, we had the first national take-up campaign, focused most directly on those who were affected by the pandemic. From the information we have already, an additional £650,000 was claimed in Wales as a result of that one month's campaign. So, I'm of course happy to give the Member an assurance that the Welsh Government will go on playing our part in making sure that the rights that women in this position have are publicised and known to them, and we're very pleased to work with the UK Government on it as well. What we need to see is an urgency about making sure that women, many of whom now are very elderly and who will maybe not be able to take advantage of the money that will be owing to them—we need an urgency about making sure that those women are compensated in the way that is their right.

Question 4, Jane Dodds.