The WASPI Pension Row Has Highlighted Important Lessons For Policy Makers

27th March 2024

An Ombudsman report into pension age change highlights big lessons for government.

The Parliamentary Ombudsman has been looking at whether women were properly informed of the rise in state pension age to bring them into line with men.

The finding of maladministration by the Parliamentary Ombudsman against the Department of Work and Pensions for its failure to inform women adequately of changes in the state pension age is a reminder to policy makers that policy announcements are not enough, argues Jill Rutter

The Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) campaign has been back in the news following a new report1 by the Parliamentary Ombudsman. The Ombudsman was not looking at the pros or cons of equalising the state pension age - not the 1995 decision to make the pension age 65 for both women and men by 2020 (it had been 60 for women and 65 for men since 1940) nor the decision in 2011 to align on 66 and accelerate the changes. Some campaigners appeared to be asking for restoration of their "lost" or "stolen" pensions2 (and they may have had some political support for that), but that was far outside the remit of the Ombudsman (and an earlier attempt at judicial review by a group arguing for that had failed). Instead, the issue at hand was whether DWP had met the necessary standard in how it went about informing women of the changes that potentially required a radical rethink of their retirement plans.

DWP's own research showed how little attention people pay to profound policy changes
One of the pitfalls for policy makers is what the Behavioural Insights team and the IfG have called "the illusion of similarity"3 - that policy makers assume that the general public will share their take on an issue, whether it is awareness of the issue or an appreciation of why a decision was taken. But most people do not spend their busy lives focusing on the latest policy announcement (and governments often do not want to trumpet bad news), and it is in this fog of uninterest that people can be left unaware of big changes.

So while the Ombudsman thought the government's general communications efforts in the mid-1990s, when the initial legislation passed, were perfectly fine, DWP's own research showed a widespread lack of awareness of the age change among those who would be most immediately affected in the early 2000s. A renewed campaign, with direct mail, was recommended to address that ignorance - but the Ombudsman judged that departmental prevarication and delay cost women a couple of years to prepare. In effect, rather than have 15-25 years to prepare, this delayed communication meant those who had failed to notice the changes in the mid-1990s had only 3-13 years to prepare – and that was exacerbated when in 2011 the government accelerated the timetable (and raised the age to 66) as part of austerity.

The case raises questions about how much awareness it is reasonable for government to expect on behalf of citizens. The government has a duty to communicate – and the big lesson is that it should have followed through after its research showed the extent to which people were oblivious to the change – but the Ombudsman is silent on whether that is tempered by any expectation on citizens to pay attention to decisions government is making.

Read he full IFS article HERE