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.