Women’s State Pension Age Communication: PHSO Report

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 2nd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, tempting though it is, I will save my wider comments on the Pension Schemes Bill for tomorrow, when I look forward to seeing the noble Lord once again in Grand Committee. It has been a great delight in recent weeks and I look forward to having the pleasure of discussing these things again tomorrow.

In answer to his questions, the decision was not inevitable. The Secretary of State looked at the evidence, assessed it all carefully and made a decision. Having made that decision based on the evidence, he issued a statement and put his reasons for the decision in the decision document which has been placed in the Library of the House.

I have two further points. One is serious, in that I agree on the importance of people saving. The Government are pursuing the Pension Schemes Bill and all the measures in it to make sure people get proper returns on their money, to ensure people can save more. That is why we set up the Pensions Commission to look at questions of adequacy. Secondly, if the noble Lord’s Government had really wanted certainty on this matter, they could have made their decision at any point before the election—but they did not.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, following the previous question, I note that saving for a pension is extraordinarily difficult for so many people who are struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head. It is really important not to preach to them about savings that they cannot possibly make.

I declare an interest in that I first met the WASPI women in 2015 and advised them on their first petition to Parliament. I am afraid I had to somewhat gently say that yes, they would get 100,000 signatures on that petition and Parliament would debate it, but it did not mean that the obvious sense of their argument would suddenly win. Politics does not work like that. So, here we are now in 2026.

My question to the Minister refers to one particular WASPI woman I met on the road outside here. She had quit her job at the age of 59 because her company was making redundancies. She thought she would get a pension very soon, so she left and took the redundancy so that younger people could keep their jobs. She then found that she would not get her pension for years. She ran out of the redundancy money and ended up on jobseeker’s allowance. She applied for job after job and did not get them. She had been an office manager for decades for a medium-sized enterprise. Then, the Department for Work and Pensions insisted that, to keep her jobseeker’s allowance, she must go on a CV-writing course and a whole lot of other really basic pieces of training. She felt utterly mistreated and abused.

I understand why the terminology in this Statement is the way that it is, and that the Government are talking in careful legalese, but as we have seen in reports today, the WASPI women are planning to fight on, and good on them. More than that, can the Minister understand how people who have been put through that ringer of a decade of poverty and struggle, and of being thoroughly disrespected by the system, would also like to hear words that acknowledge that?