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Not one MP in Parliament came to the rescue of Mel Stride, the work and pension secretary, when he made his initial statement on the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s report which concluded that there was maladministration over the delay in communicating the six year delay to women in the 1950s and either Parliament or the DWP should compensate them.
Essentially it was a holding statement with the minister emphasising that it was a complex 100 page report which he had to consider very carefully.
“The ombudsman has noted in his report the challenges and the complexities of this issue. In laying the report before Parliament, the ombudsman has brought matters to the attention of the House and we will provide a further update to the House once we have considered the report’s findings.”
He also tried to drag in the judicial review, then pursued by Back to 60, for the reason for the delay in the Ombudsman’s report, citing that the two courts the High Court and the Court of Appeal had presented as fact that the DWP had not acted unlawfully ( no one said they had) over maladministration. The trouble is he got it wrong, the hearings which I attended, were about discrimination in the past not maladministration. As Marcia Will Stewart, the lawyer from Bimberg Peirce, said in 2019 “Our judicial review had nothing to do with maladministration investigation, whatever others may say”. And as she was bringing the case I prefer her analysis to Mel Stride’s.
Indeed Mr Stride’s only other friend in Parliament was Liz Kendall, Labour’s Opposition spokesman, who said:
“This is a serious report that requires serious consideration. The ombudsman has rightly said it is for the Government to respond but that Parliament should also consider its findings.
“Members on this side of the House will look carefully at the report too and continue to listen respectfully to those involved, as we have done from the start.” ( in other words we don’t want to lose your vote in case you think we are siding with Tories).
But it was the Tories who, while polite, were not his best friends. None of them defended the government’s delay and all pressed for a decision. It started with Caroline Noakes, who chairs the Women and Equalities select committee, who said:
““I recognise this is an interim update but I would gently press (Mr Stride) that Waspi women have been waiting five years for the ombudsman, they won’t want to wait for a select committee inquiry into this report in order to see action from the Government.”
Soon it became clear that many other Tories, mindful of holding on to their seats, did not want unnecessary delays. Tory MPs representing Stroud, Scunthorpe, North Norfolk, Eastbourne, Waveney, Weston super Mare, Amber Valley and the Isle of Wight were among many who made it abundantly clear they would not brook this being pushed into the long grass.
Bob Seely, the MP for the Isle of Wight, while praising the government for keeping the triple lock, had every reason to be concerned – he has the largest number of 50swomen in his present constituency and foul wind combined with their lack of support ( even if the Island now gets two seats) could sweep him away.
But the government faced its greatest attack from the Scottish National Party who members slammed ministers. Patricia Gibson, their official spokesman and MP for North Ayrshire and Arran, hit out at ” timid Labour” and ministers.
“We in the SNP stand shoulder to shoulder with these women, who have been abandoned and betrayed by the UK Government and the future Labour Government. Will the Secretary of State tell the House what it will take to compensate these women? Do we need another TV drama to embarrass and shame the Government into doing the right thing? “
Other SNP MPs cited deaths of the women in their constituencies and the anger among the women. Ian Blackford, the former Westminster SNP leader said: “Can we imagine what would happen in this place if it was announced that private sector pensions were being put back by six years? Rightly, there would be outrage, and there should be outrage about what happened to the WASPI women.”
Joanna Cherry picked up on Mel Stride and Labour muddying the waters over raising the judicial review
“The WASPI campaign has asked me to emphasise its annoyance about how often Government Ministers, when talking about these issues, attempt to muddy the waters by referring back to the unsuccessful litigation to reverse the increase to the state pension age, or to claim direct discrimination. That was not litigation by the official WASPI campaign, and I am sure that its members were annoyed to hear a senior Labour Front Bencher doing the same thing on the radio last night.”
Labour backbenchers took a much stronger line than their front bench demanding a timetable for the implementation of compensation starting with Marsha de Cordova, representing Battersea.
“The Secretary of State has said that he wants to continue to look in detail at the findings of the report, but surely he should be able to make an unambiguous commitment to compensation for these women.”
Imran Hussain, representing Bradford East said: “Will he at least accept that every time a Minister stands up and says “undue delay” or “due process” they really mean that they have no intention of addressing the problem, and are saving face and kicking the can down the road?
Other criticism came from Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor, told him:” we have no confidence in the Department for Work and Pensions to resolve its basic failure of decades ago..”
It will not have been a pleasant experience for Mel Stride who was probably glad Parliament closed for the day after this statement. He would be extremely stupid not to take note but MPs will have to keep up the pressure to get any compensation out of this government. Only the fear of being swept out of power will make them do anything, but whether it be enough money will be another matter.
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Today’s report from Robert Behrens, the Parliamentary Ombudsman, is one of the most underwhelming publications ever to come from a public figure asked to redress a major injustice.
After toiling over his report for some seven years all he can produce is a mouse of a publication which leaves some 3.5 million women born in the 1950s having to fight their corner all over again to get compensation for waiting six more years to get their pension.
We should have known it was likely to be lacklustre after his first preliminary report conceded only “partial maladministration ” for the way the Department for Work and Pensions failed to communicate with the women about the long wait they would have to get their pensions. This immediately lowered the amount of compensation he might award at the end – ruling out the highest level. And WASPI under Angela Madden, were totally stupid not to challenge this at the time, particularly as evidence emerged during the judicial review brought by the ” Back to 60 ” campaign that the DWP’s own civil servants had urged the then secretary of state, Peter now Lord Lilley, to run a campaign to tell the women as long ago as 1997. They knew the women hadn’t realised the implications.
Now today’s report completely ducks the issue, make no recommendation for an award and caves into spurious objections from the DWP that it is either too costly to find the people affected or too costly to pay out. Given the DWP know the details of every pensioner bank account as they have to pay them every month, this is plain ridiculous. At least he spared them the other claim from the DWP that some of the 50s women were fraudsters if they put in a claim. No doubt this civil servant who wrote this relished prosecuting and jailing these elderly women like the managers who led the Post Office pursued the sub postmasters.
There is some guidance in his report which appears to suggest he might have thought giving them a range of compensation from £1000 each to £2900 but there is no detailed mechanism of how this could be done.
And as for asking Parliament to decide, the big question is how? For start there is no agreement on the level of compensation. Is it the £1000 – £2900 hinted by the Ombudsman ? Is it the £10,000 promised by Angela Madden and the All Party Parliamentary Group on this issue? Should it be the £58 billion that the former Labour chancellor, John McDonnell, promised during Labour’s last election campaign?Or should it be full restitution of all the money promised by CEDAWinLAW, which could end up with some getting over £40,000. There is plenty of space for everyone to disagree and delay.
What is the mechanism that will force the DWP to give into demands from Parliament? The answer is that there is none. Angela Madden today was spectacularly naive in thinking that is is wonderful that Parliament will decide.
For a start the Parliamentary agenda is almost totally controlled by Government whips. And do people really think the government, which opposes paying anything, is going to make Government time available to debate something they don’t want to hear? Also Labour may be reluctant to use one of its Opposition days to debate the issue because it would force them to declare their hand and then be subject to barrage of attacks from the Tories claiming everybody’s taxes were to go up to pay these women? Only the Scottish National Party could risk calling a debate as the bill falls on Westminster not Holyrood.
A backbencher could put up a motion but I gather this would not be binding on the DWP who would safely ignore it.
The Parliamentary Ombudsman, who retires this week, could have given a clear uncompromising lead on what could have been done but flunked it. Frankly if I read the Jerusalem Post correctly he has give more uncompromising support to the Israeli government’s bombing of Gaza than he has defending the rights of cheated pensioners in this country.
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William Wragg, the Tory chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, has belatedly intervened in the growing crisis over the failure of the Prime Minister to appoint a new Parliamentary Ombudsman to replace Rob Behrens who quits on March 31.
In a letter published on the committee’s website Mr Wragg asks Sir Alex Allan, the senior non executive director on the Parliamentary and Heath Services Ombudsman board, what measures will be taken to keep the office going and what is going to happen to people who, via their MP, want to lodge a complaint to the Ombudsman. He also raises whether reports can be published and complaints investigated. Particularly at risk is the long awaited report on the partial maladministration for 50swomen who faced a six year delay getting their pension.
The letter discloses that recruitment for a new Ombudsman began last October and a panel chose the winning candidate at the beginning of January. Since then the Cabinet Office and Rishi Sunak, who has to approve the appointment, have not responded. The silence from Whitehall and Downing Street means no motion can be put to Parliament appointing a new Ombudsman, who then appears before the PACAC for a pre appointment hearing. PACAC has only a couple of weeks to set up the hearing.
The publication of the letter by the committee is in fact a response to a letter written to Mr Wragg from Sir Alex warning of dire consequences for the corporate body if no one was appointed and suggesting that Rebecca Hilsenrath, the current chief executive is appointed as an Interim Ombudsman. The letter was briefly on the committee’s website but withdrawn the moment I published a blog about it.
Part of it read:
I am aware that, due to the preferred candidate’s notice period, there will be a need to appoint an
interim Ombudsman and that the view remains that this should be Rebecca Hilsenrath, Chief
Executive Officer at PHSO. We have yet to receive confirmation of this, despite the urgency, which
is making it difficult for the organisation to properly plan for leadership change.
As a corporation sole, the organisation cannot operate without an Ombudsman in post. Any delay to
the appointment puts the organisation at considerable risk. In particular because key casework
decisions could not be taken it puts at risk all of the work to reduce the queue and improve service
to complainants. Clarity of the timeline for both the permanent and interim Ombudsman appointments is therefore pressing,
However the antiquated legislation suggests that the PHSO board cannot appoint its own acting ombudsman. It has to be appointed from outside the board.
The legislation specifically refers to an “Acting Ombudsman” and, as such, cannot be appointed by the PHSO Board of Directors.
Section 3A of the 1967 Act deals with the appointment of an Acting Commissioner who serves at the pleasure of His Majesty.
The Acting Commissioner can only serve for a maximum of 12 months or until a new Commissioner is appointed (whichever is sooner).
The full text of William Wragg’s letter is here.
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Last week I attended a meeting of the industry forum, a progressive think tank that discusses crucial business and economic issues often addressed by Labour politicians and MPs under Chatham House rules. This one was different for two reasons. It was “on the record” and it was addressed by a former Tory minister, Francis Maude, one of the founders of Policy Exchange, a Conservative think tank and traditionally to the right of the party.
But before anyone on the left start to think this is another example of Sir Keir Starmer’s lurch to the right, this was an unusual and useful meeting of minds.
Lord Maude has recently conducted a thorough and detailed independent review of the governance and accountability of the civil service for the government – not the most sexiest of subjects. But its important findings have been spurned by the present Tory government.
To my mind there is a lot to be learned from this review for both Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party. It is quite clear from the latest interviews with Labour’s shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, that she believes that if Labour win the next election it is going very difficult for them to spend more cash on the day to day running of public services. Labour needs to make sure it doesn’t waste a penny of taxpayer’s money and Lord Maude’s proposed reforms could help them achieve this.
What Lord Maude frankly exposes is that Whitehall is directionless. Yes there are theoretical controls – the PM is technically responsible for running the civil service. But there is no system of delegating this power to either civil servants or ministers.
The result in his words: ” The centre is now unwieldy, with confusion about where responsibilities lie and a lack of clear lines of accountability. Other jurisdictions with similar systems provide signposts to improved arrangements.”
Why this is important is that it means there is a lack of overall control on how large areas of government spending are made and how effective the policies implemented by governments are in practice. One only has to read my articles in Byline Times to see legions of exposures by the National Audit Office of waste, inefficiency and bad decision making which could have saved the taxpayer billions.
Lord Maude’s proposals include merging the Cabinet and the Prime Minster’s office into one powerful body – so a future PM will have much greater control over the direction of the government – and a new Office of Budget and Management to bring together cross Whitehall projects which tend to fall into a void because of Whitehall’s silo mentality.
The head of the civil service should also be a full time job so he or she can concentrate on bringing about all these reforms and so should the First Civil Service Commissioner who should be in charge of a wider programme and be able to hold the head of the civil service to account and make an annual report to Parliament.
Every minister should get a letter telling him or her clearly what their powers are and what they should expect from civil servants.
Not a lot of this is radical stuff. Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand already have similar systems because they are more modern democracies than the UK.
Labour are about to start talking to the civil service under the usual courtesy given to opposition parties before a general election. This would be an ideal situation to raise this. I would also suggest that the Shadow Cabinet should have a session with Gareth Davies, the head of the National Audit Office, to draw on the independent body’s wealth of experience of what went wrong in the past and how they could avoid such pitfalls in the future. Voters will depend on Labour getting it right.
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Tomorrow’s Wellingborough by-election brings back memories of an earlier by-election there 55 years ago which nearly ended my career.
The election was triggered by the death of the sitting Labour MP. Harry Howarth and was won by the Tory candidate Peter Fry a right wing populist who blamed Labour for the permissive society of the 1960s and later voted against joining the European Economic Community, the predecessor of the European Union. He died in 2015. His losing Labour opponent was John Mann, a local man, who with his wife Jean, a county councillor, was a stalwart of the local Labour Party. He is alive and we still exchange Christmas cards.
I was a young cub reporter, fresh from Warwick University, one of the first graduates to join the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph, apprenticed at £16 and sixpence a week. I had that summer married my wife, Margaret. Aged just 22, I was young and enthusiastic and learnt my trade covering parish councils, magistrates courts and local societies.
Imagine my excitement when a by-election was declared in the autumn of 1969 in Wellingborough, a sleepy Northamptonshire market town, extended only by a Greater London Council estate which meant the town had a mixture of Northamptonshire and Cockney accents. I would be able to rub shoulders with the ” big boys ” – then they were mostly male – from the nationals coming to cover it. And indeed I did, meeting, I remember, Laurence Marks from the Observer and numerous journalists from the Mail , Express and the Daily Mirror.
Now Peter Fry being on the right of the party invited Enoch Powell to speak at a hustings meeting. I managed to get there – not to report- and bring my wife, than a teacher at a local infants school.
Powell did not repeat his infamous ” rivers of blood speech” on immigration made the year before but instead gave a rather dry speech on economics. But the audience had been infiltrated by local Young Socialists. They started heckling him and then my wife joined in. I decided as I was a reporter I should remain neutral and didn’t.
After the meeting we had some drinks with some of the national journalists who thought my wife had been brave and I didn’t think much more about it.
The next day I discovered that the local Tory big wigs and Mr Fry had been in touch with the editor, Ron Howe, to get me the sack. My crime was ” I had failed to control my wife” at the meeting. I had not thought about that as I always regard my wife as an independent person and not supposed to be controlled by me. But it says a lot about attitudes in Wellingborough in the late 1960s.
But the editor decided not to sack me. Instead I was banned from the Conservative Club in the town for at least a year ( I didn’t mind that) and was not allowed to write about Conservatives. If I had been sacked my journalist career would have just been 15 months long instead of the 56 years today. I had escaped nemesis by a hair’s breath.
I did redeem myself two years later. Wellingborough Urban District Council called a secret meeting of the whole council to discuss plans for six options for a new inner city ring road – these were the fashion in the early 1970s. One option involved demolishing 300 houses to make way for the road. A local Labour councillor decided this was too much and leaked all the proposals to me. It made the splash, the project was eventually buried and I won my first journalist award as reporter of the year on the East Midlands Allied Press group. I did get a summons to see to town clerk who was furious with me saying ” Who the hell do you think you are, you’re not working for the Guardian”. When I did six years later I was tempted to ring him up. My local editor backed me and in turn threatened the town clerk with national publicity for the cover up.
I then left the Northants ET as a qualified journalist and I got a job on the Western Mail in Cardiff. I suspected the Tory Establishment in Wellingborough were glad to see the back of me.
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Parliament and the Health Service will not have a new permanent Ombudsman from April because the Prime Minister has delayed approving a new replacement who anyway cannot start work at the office because he or she has to give notice to leave their present job.
Details of the crisis at the office are revealed in an email sent on January 29 from Sir Alex Allan, a senior non executive member of the board of the Ombudsman’s office, to William Wragg, Tory chair of the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC).
Sir Alex is a former high flying civil servant who chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee, and was the Prime Minister’s independent adviser on ministerial standards until 2020 when he resigned after Boris Johnson refused to accept his report on Priti Patel, the former home secretary, concluding that her behaviour was bullying.
The email pleads with William Wragg to contact Downing Street to resolve the problem as a matter of urgency.
His email warns:
“As a corporation sole, the organisation cannot operate without an Ombudsman in post. Any delay to the appointment puts the organisation at considerable risk. In particular because key casework decisions could not be taken it puts at risk all of the work to reduce the queue and improve service to complainants. Clarity of the timeline for both the permanent and interim Ombudsman
appointments is therefore pressing.”
A pre-appointment hearing - part of the normal appointment process - had been pencilled in by PACAC to quiz the new Ombudsman but that has been pit back and there is no date for a future hearing. The page announcing the future hearing on the website is now blank.
He goes on: “”I am pleased that the Panel, led by Philippa Helme, has identified a preferred candidate but I am concerned about the apparent delays since then. We have yet to receive confirmation that the preferred candidate has been agreed by the Prime Minister. “
Sir Alex says the board’s preferred solution is to appoint an interim Ombudsman and suggests Rebecca Hilsenrath, the current chief executive who moved there from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, would be the ideal candidate.
But Whitehall has not even approved this. He writes: “We have yet to receive confirmation of this, despite the urgency, which is making it difficult for the organisation to properly plan for leadership change.”
The crisis facing the Ombudsman’s Office raises a whole of questions which I tried to put to them.
This includes questions like whether Rebecca Hilsenrath, if appointed as an interim, will be able to announce case decisions affecting complaints about hospitals and the NHS, or will they have to wait until they have a permanent appointment?
From Sir Alex’s letter it is also clear if neither people are approved by Downing Street and the Cabinet Office, the office would cease to function altogether until this was sorted out.
The impasse could also affect the timing of the publication of the final report by the outgoing Ombudsman, Rob Behrens, on maladministration in 50s women’s delayed pensions. WASPI have been waiting years for its publication and have seen the draft report which has already been leaked on this website. See the blog here.
A PHSO spokesperson said:
“The process to appoint a new Ombudsman is ongoing. We are in discussions about interim arrangements should they be needed. Our important service for the public continues.”
A spokesperson for PACAC said the committee could not comment but the original pre appointment hearing had been scheduled for last month but because they had not had confirmation from the Cabinet Office that the government had approved the appointment no date was fixed. The email should not have published on their website which is why it was taken down. This suggests that Rishi Sunak has been delaying a decision to approve the appointment for weeks.
For those interested the text of the email is published below:
From the Senior Non-Executive, Sir Alex Allan KCB
Sent by Email Only: pacac@parliament.uk
29 January 2024
Dear Mr Wragg,
I am writing to convey my concerns about the slippage in the timetable to appoint a new
Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) and to ask for your support, as Chair of the
Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, in raising these concerns with No 10.
I am pleased that the Panel, led by Philippa Helme, has identified a preferred candidate but I am
concerned about the apparent delays since then. We have yet to receive confirmation that the
preferred candidate has been agreed by the Prime Minister. That meant that the planned preappointment scrutiny hearing had to be cancelled and has not been refixed.
I am aware that, due to the preferred candidate’s notice period, there will be a need to appoint an
interim Ombudsman and that the view remains that this should be Rebecca Hilsenrath, Chief
Executive Officer at PHSO. We have yet to receive confirmation of this, despite the urgency, which
is making it difficult for the organisation to properly plan for leadership change.
As a corporation sole, the organisation cannot operate without an Ombudsman in post. Any delay to
the appointment puts the organisation at considerable risk. In particular because key casework
decisions could not be taken it puts at risk all of the work to reduce the queue and improve service
to complainants. Clarity of the timeline for both the permanent and interim Ombudsman appointments is therefore pressing,
I have written to Baroness Neville-Rolfe to convey these concerns and I would be grateful if you
would consider raising them with the Prime Minister’s office.
Yours sincerely,
Sir Alex Allan
Senior Non-Executive Director
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UPDATE: Papers have now been served on Mel Stride, Secretary of State for work and pensions, and the DWP for acting unreasonably in refusing to agree to mediation over the issue of the six year delay to 1950s women’s pensions. The ministry will now have 21 days to file a response and then the case will have to go to court.
The Government’s attitude in not recognising there is a problem chimes well with their handling of the Post Office postmaster’s scandal and in delaying compensation for people hit by the contaminated blood scandal. Their attitude to my mind suggests there is a Whitehall playbook to avoid paying people any compensation for as long as possible, probably drawn up by Government lawyers, in the hope that many people will be dead before the inevitable pay out is made.
Since the publication of this blog the DWP has confirmed it is now involved in litigation with CEDAWinLAW but does not wish to comment about it.
But interestingly Rob Behrens, the Parliamentary Ombudsman, has pulled back from his threat to pause his investigation ( see below). He now says he will review the position only if the courts give permission to CEDAWinLAW to bring a judicial review. This means the confidential consultation will continue until January 19 and the report is still scheduled to be published on March 23.
The legal battle against Mel Stride, the work and pension secretary, over his refusal to consider mediation in the long running dispute over50s women pensions has begun.
Papers were lodged at the High Court yesterday by lawyers representing the campaigning group .CEDAWinLAW on behalf of 3.5 million people who faced a six year delay to receiving their pension.
In a statement the organisation said:
“CEDAWinLAW earlier instructed Professor John Cooper KC, ‘One of the Top 10 influential lawyers in the UK’, 25bedfordrow.com and David Greene, Senior Partner, edwincoe.com to represent ALL 1950’s Women in a judicial review against the Secretary of State for Work & Pensions in relation to the DWP’s refusal to mediate following from the Judge’s Report which sets out in depth the way in which those affected have enforceable rights which have been breached.
We are delighted to announce today that our legal team has issued at the court an Application for a Judicial Review in the matter which, in turn, is now being served on the Respondent.
Included as part of the lodged Application & Bundles, an expert witness statement authored by The Hon Dr Jocelynne Scutt AO, the former Australian judge, who produced a report on the discrimination faced by 50s women.
Please kindly donate to meet our legal team costs and @crowdjustice platform fees. The link is :https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/group-class-action/ “
The lodging of the papers will mean the Department for Work and Pensions will have to lodge a response to the new judicial review breaking their silence over the matter and their refusal to contemplate any mediation over the matter.
What the position of the Parliamentary Ombudsman, Robert Behrens, to this new development is not entirely clear. He is handling a separate case involving maladministration and is currently consulting in confidence over 500 people and the six complainants on his final report until January 19. His plan was to publish it on March 23 just a few days before his retirement. His main findings and the Department’s response to him were published on this blog here and here.
During a hearing with the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee in November Mr Behrens in a reply to Ronnie Cowan, the Scottish National Party MP for Inverclyde, said:
“It is not in our hands, Mr Cowan, to be able to be definitive about what the end date is going to be. If there is further litigation, then that will delay the process even further. That is out of our
hands.”
It now is and his reaction and the DWP’s reaction to this new development is awaited.
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Last week was Whistleblower Awareness Week and Whistleblowers UK and the All Party Parliamentary Group on Whistleblowing organised a two day event in Parliament on issues affecting whistleblowing.
I attended the two hour session aptly entitled Whistleblowing in Health care – a Lesson in Futility? It drew a wide selection of people from the UK and the Isle of Man including doctors, lawyers, judges, nurses and speak up guardians
These included Dr Chris Day , who has been fighting Lewisham and Greenwich Health Trust for ten years after reporting two avoidable deaths in the intensive care unit at Woolwich Hospital and Martyn Pitman, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, who recently lost a case against Hampshire Hospitals Trust, reporting patient safety issues after a mother died giving birth in one of their hospitals. Both cases can be found in a series of articles on my blog.
But one of the most striking contributions came from Rob Behrens, the Parliamentary Ombudsman – an Establishment figure – and the Health Service Commissioner more familiar to my readers over the debacle in getting compensation for 3.5 million 50swomen who faced a six year delay in getting their pension.
In a short powerful speech he rightly lambasted the culture inside the NHS which is leading to the failure, ,persecution and character assassination of whistleblowing doctors and nurses who report patient safety issues.
Describing the system in the NHS as “command and control”, he described the contrast between the management of trusts boasting to him how open their institutions were only to find the opposite when he talked to people lower down the food chain dealing with the complaints.
He pleaded for a more ” collegiate NHS” where managers and staff worked together rather than against each other. he wanted ” fundamental change” in the leadership of the NHS.
But his speech also revealed how impotent his role is in handling healthcare issues. He pointed out that the Ombudsman was handicapped by outdated legislation, couldn’t deal with staff issues unlike other Ombudsmen, was unable to take any initiatives himself, and couldn’t force the NHS to make changes even he wanted them to do so. None of this does his reputation with the public any good. I have only covered one of his cases. You can read about it here. Health warning it is a very grim story and the Ombudsman could only partially investigate it.
How he must envy Margaret Kelly, the Northern Ireland Ombudsman, set up under more modern legislation, who has and uses her powers to initiate investigations. A report here on my blog shows how she took on private company Capita and its failure to treat disabled people properly applying for Personal Independence Payments.
At the moment plans to get a new law to protect whistleblowers ( they are also covered by outdated legislation which trusts can use lawyers to get round its provisions) is stalled. So is any legislation to give the Parliamentary Ombudsman fresh powers or rationalise the plethora of other ombudsmen in this country. I suggested one step that could be taken in election year would be for whistleblowers to press the major parties to include a pledge to legislate in their manifestos. There is an “oven ready” bill already by Whistleblowers UK to reform the system which could be the basis for fresh change. It is time we ended talking and took some action.
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All 3.5 million 50s born women including the six “test case” complainants should get no compensation because there has been no maladministration and no evidence of financial loss, the DWP has told Rob Behrens, the Parliamentary Ombudsman. Even if there were maladministration the submission says his report does not show “there was injustice as a consequence of that maladministration.”
Their 118 paragraph submission rejects his entire draft report and his modest proposal of £1000 compensation for the six test cases, which the department says is, anyway, too high.
The coruscating response to the Ombudsman in a document marked ” official sensitive” is highly critical of his findings, the campaign to get compensation by WASPI, and makes the extraordinary suggestion that many of the claims by women could turn out to be fraudulent.
The attitude of the officials to the claim explains the real reason why Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, is against mediation as he is obviously being advised that the ministry has no case to answer and why the Ombudsman, who must be embarrassed by the language in the submission, has turned to Parliament as a last resort.
The findings must be a major blow to Angela Madden, the organiser for WASPI, who only last year claimed at the Labour Party Conference that the women would get £10,000 to £20,000 compensation from the ministry.
Much of the submission is devoted to the Ombudsman’s proposal that all the women who have similar circumstances must get similar compensation and fund set up to deal with the wider question of compensation for financial loss. This means that the department would have to examine each case in detail which , according to the paper , would mean employing 5,500 extra staff, and take away people from other work like paying people’s pensions on their retirement and awarding pension credit.
The submission says: “DWP would not have information on all 1950s-born women and we would have to source their information – for example, through HMRC. We would also need bank details in order to make an automated payment and these would be obtained through outreach and/or some way for citizens to provide their details. Such a scenario would take significant setting-up and would have wide ranging impacts on DWP’s other critical business, with likely costs of the digital aspects.” It says this would take 18 months to set up.
It is the fraud claim over financial losses that is most extraordinary.
The submission says: “We are concerned that the Ombudsman’s proposed recommendations would generate a major fraud risk and be hugely and disproportionately burdensome to implement.”
“… we expect that the existence of a scheme would result in many claimants endeavouring to provide such evidence. The Department would then have to try out many extensive and expensive investigations to decide whether the evidence was sufficient to prove financial loss. We expect that claimants will be
encouraged to make claims for financial loss and that template letters will be circulated to support such claims. The cost of living crisis may also drive increased volumes of claims.
“This seems to be an entirely unnecessary expense for the taxpayer given that the Ombudsman has found no sufficient evidence on the 6 sample cases, we found no sufficient evidence on the 10,000 cases, and we cannot see how sufficient evidence could be available.”
The submission does not even accept that that there was anything wrong with the ministry’s communication to 50swomen. The Ombudsman makes another modest proposal that officials report to him and the chairs of the work and pensions and public administration select committtees, Stephen Timms and William Wragg on what they have done six months after his report is published.
“”You have recommended that within 6 months of your final report we explain to you and the chairs of the WPSC and PACAC what we have done since these events happened or what we plan to do.
….”we do not agree to report to you and the chairs of the 2 committees within 6 months of your final report being published. Also, your findings relate to historic events. We are not clear on the benefit of
considering these events with the advantage of hindsight.”
I am not surprised this confidential submission was labelled ” sensitive”. It shows up the arrogant way officials behave towards 3.5 million elderly women, their disdain for remarkably modest proposals from the Ombudsman, dislike of organisations like Waspi for organising ” template letters” and a level of complacency they have in their administration of this vexed and prolonged process of raising the pension age. Their official attitude is little better than Boris Johnson’s quip during the Covid pandemic “let the elderly die”.
I have not bothered to either inform or contact the Ombudsman’s Office or the DWP on this leaked report as the Ombudsman is bound by law from commenting during an investigation and the DWP never comment on leaked documents.
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