Express.co.uk spoke to Irene, a 1950s-born woman who attended a protest in Parliament Square in efforts to raise the profile of WASPI women and the state pension age. She said: “There’s a total injustice that is still going on, and we’re being insulted by this Government because they are still ignoring our plight.
“The Parliamentary Ombudsman has found there has been maladministration by the DWP in failure to notify us when we should’ve been told.
“They know what they’ve taken from 1950s-born women and it is beyond wrong.”
The WASPI campaign has recently scored a victory in their fight to secure compensation for the “injustice” they argue they have experienced.
The PHSO conceded out of court that part of its investigation into how increases to the state pension age were communicated was flawed and must be reconsidered.
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This was as a result of the WASPI campaign launching a judicial review in the High Court to challenge the stage two report, raising £120,000 from thousands of affected women.
Irene states she continues to remain frustrated about the progress of the matter.
She continued: “We are just trying to make an impact, even though now many of us are now approaching 70 years of age.
“We shouldn’t have to be out protesting and we shouldn’t have to ask for this from the Government time and time again.
Irene said: “People often feel like there is no end in sight.
“The simple truth is that a lot of us simply cannot continue working until the age of 66.
“We’ve brought up families as well as having full-time jobs, and many of us started work at the age of 16 – that’s 50 years.
“Not everybody had free higher education available to them back in the early 1970s, and had to start work and pay in their National Insurance contributions.
“We’ve been doing that on the basis we would get a state pension at the age of 60 – that is what was always told to us.”
However, Irene said she is holding on to hope for a positive outcome for 1950s-born women in the future.
She added: “We’re hoping that somebody somewhere will have some moral fibre and recognise there has been an injustice to this particular cohort of women. We should be rightly compensated for this injustice – and not just with a derisory amount of a couple of hundred pounds either! I might be smiling now, but I’m furious!”
A PHSO spokesperson recently told Express.co.uk they are considering what action the DWP should have taken, to put right the injustice found.
The spokesperson said: “We have shared provisional views with complainants, their MPs and DWP. Once we have considered further evidence we will publish a full report on our findings.”
A DWP spokesperson added: “The Government decided over 25 years ago that it was going to make the state pension age the same for men and women as a long-overdue move towards gender equality.
“Both the High Court and Court of Appeal have supported the actions of the DWP, under successive governments dating back to 1995, and the Supreme Court refused the claimants permission to appeal.”
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