Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether her Department has had discussions with WASPI campaign groups on the time taken for complaints raised by women affected by measures taken to equalise the state pension age to be dealt with by her Department; and if she will make a statement.

Under successive governments, individual departments have set up complaints procedures.

The Department for Work and Pensions has a two tier complaints process which considers formal complaints about our service. As outlined on GOV.UK, DWP complaints processes encourages customers in the first instance to raise their issues with the office they are dealing with, as a business as usual contact, so we put things right.

If the customer remains unhappy with the response, they can escalate their concerns, which will be dealt with by the Complaints Resolution Team as part of the formal DWP complaints process. The complaint is independently investigated. Where cases cannot be resolved to the customer’s satisfaction, the customer can escalate their complaint to the Director General as part of the tier two complaint process.

Escalated complaints represent the final business review and response to the complaint.

Once a complainant has exhausted the DWP complaint process they are signposted to the Independent Case Examiner’s (ICE) Office if they are dissatisfied with the final response to their complaint.

Complaints received from women born in the 1950s and affected by changes in State Pension age are handled in line with the overall Departmental complaints process published on GOV.UK.

The role of the Independent Case Examiner (ICE) is to consider case-specific complaints of maladministration (service failure). The vast majority of the complaints that are referred to ICE are complex and require the circumstances of each case to be considered on its merits. Prior to the WASPI campaign the ICE Office routinely accepted in the region of 1,100 and 1,200 complaints for examination each year. At the end of February 2018, the Office had accepted 1,907 WASPI complaints alone.

In January 2017, the ICE Office took the decision to bring a lead case into investigation in order to familiarise itself with the issues underpinning the campaign. This investigation concluded in June 2017 – the ICE did not uphold the complaint. Whilst the Office has had no additional resource to deal with the WASPI campaign complaints, a dedicated team of investigation case managers was established (from within existing resources) in October 2017 to investigate this group of complaints. The ICE Office aim to complete investigation within 20 weeks of starting work on a case, the WASPI related ICE reports that had been concluded to date have been completed within an average of 9.75 weeks. To date, the ICE had not upheld any case specific complaints that DWP failed to provide adequate and timely information relating to the increase in their State Pension age. All final ICE reports explain how the complainant can escalate their complaint to the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s Office.

There are no plans to dedicate additional resources to investigating this group of complaints, as to do so would disadvantage other groups of complainants whose cases are awaiting investigation.

The Parliamentary Health and Service Ombudsman make final decisions on complaints that have not been resolved by UK Government Departments. This was set up in 1967 under the then Labour Government.