1. What legal advice has the Counsel General provided to the Minister for Social Justice regarding the steps the Welsh Government can take to assist women who were born in the 1950s that were refused their pensions? OQ59187

Thank you for your question. The Welsh Government has repeatedly expressed concerns to the UK Government about women who had their state pension age raised without effective or sufficient notification. We await the full report of the ombudsman’s investigation, which will recommend actions for the Department for Work and Pensions to remedy the injustice found.

I declare an interest because my mother is one of the Women Against State Pension Inequality women. The WASPI women—women denied their pensions—have been campaigning for seven long years and still await the parliamentary ombudsman’s resolution report into the DWP’s handling of their situation. The report is due to be released very soon, but information that has reached the press has garnered significant concern that any compensation given to the women will be very little, reportedly just a few hundred pounds for all of the 1950s women. That is far short of what has been snatched from them. If these reports turn out to be true, it will represent a catastrophic injustice done to these women, discriminated against and targeted because of their gender and their age.

Can you please set out what your legal advice will be to the Welsh Government in these circumstances as to how they can support the WASPI women in their campaign? What routes of legal redress would there be for them? Could they legally challenge the ombudsman’s findings, and could you please release, Counsel General, all responses you’ve received to previous letters that you have sent to the UK Government about this campaign?

Thank you for that supplementary question. Just by way of general comment to your question, I think the treatment of women born in the 1950s by successive Conservative Governments remains a national scandal. Since the launch of the WASPI campaign in 2015, more than 200,000 WASPI women have died without ever seeing or receiving pension justice, so the women who continue to be affected by this issue have already been disadvantaged as a result of two hikes to the state pension age, and now we learn that the current UK Government is considering doing it all over again. Can I say that, since 2016, the Welsh Government has been writing to the UK Government to highlight our concerns regarding the communication of changes to the women’s state pension age? I will continue to make those representations. I will have to access the correspondence in respect of the replies that we have had, and I can write to you separately about that.

What I can also say though, is, of course, the latest findings from Stage 2 of the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman report are that there was a maladministration in the DWP’s communication about national insurance qualifying years, and complaint handling. And I believe that it must be the case that, for those who’ve been so adversely affected, the finding must be that that damage must be rectified and people must be properly compensated; the many thousands of people who had to carry on working year after year, despite the fact that the contract that they agreed—many, many years ago in their youth with regard to their pension age and what their entitlements would be—was broken. It was a sad breach and I believe they’re entitled to be properly compensated for that.