A former DWP boss has warned millions of people who may be expecting huge sums of cash are likely to instead receive "tiny bits of compensation".
Former Liberal Democrat MP Sir Steve Webb, who held the post of pensions minister under the Coalition government, appeared on The Martin Lewis Money Show Live this week in a special edition of the programme looking at pensions. He is now a partner at Lane Clark and Peacock, the pensions consultancy firm which first helped identify State Pension underpayments for thousands of women.
The Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign (WASPI), Sir Webb said, may receive significantly less cash than expected once the Parliamentary Ombudsman has released its final report.
READ MORE: PIP, DLA and Attendance Allowance claimants could receive up to £8,983 tax-free from DWP
His comments came in response to a query from a viewer called Julie, who emailed the show and said: “Like so many other WASPI women, I had no notification that my pension age had risen to 66. I was expecting to retire at 60, the extra six years came as a terrible blow, but still no movement on any sort of resolution, why?”
The Daily Record reports Martin Lewis told viewers: “The Waspi and over-60s campaign has been going on a long time and it’s something I’ve supported. It all happened because in 1995 the State Pension age was extended and it wasn’t communicated, then it was extended again and wasn’t communicated.
“There’s been a court case that was lost, there’s been a Parliamentary Ombudsman ruling that has been won but we don’t yet know the result.”
An estimated 3.8mi women across Great Britain missed out on State Pension payments due to the change in retirement age from 60 to 65 between April 2010 and November 2018, which later increased to 66 for men and women in October 2020.
The 1995 Pensions Act increased the State Pension age for women from 60 to 65 in order to equalise the age with men, with the change to be phased in over 10 years from 2010 for women born in the 1950s.
Mr Lewis asked Sir Webb: "Did you get it wrong", to which he replied: "I don’t think we got it wrong but what happened before that, which the Ombudsman found was that the previous government knew that women didn’t know. That was the issue.”
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