UPDATE: Following publication of this post one issue has been raised by John Halford, Waspi’s lawyer from Bindman’s. He says it is not true that originally you needed permission for both parties or would have to pay £300 to attend the case management hearing. I have checked this back and staff at the administrative court did advise people to do this and told people If no agreement then you need to complete N244 Application form at a cost of £300 to register. This was overruled by the judge on December 2 who made it an open hearing. I passed this back to Mr Halford only to find he had blocked me sending a reply. What extraordinary behaviour from a lawyer.

A long awaited decision on the six year battle for redress for the 3.6 million remaining 50s women has been promised by the Department for Work and Pensions by the end of February next year – as part of a deal agreed between the ministry and Waspi Ltd.

Under the deal Waspi has dropped its judicial review claim due to be heard next week and accepted an offer by the DWP to pay the Waspi company £180,000 towards its legal costs in bringing the claim.

Most of the manoeuvring to obtain this arrangement has been behind the scenes in meetings between lawyers on both sides. As a result there will be no public hearing in the courts of the arguments where both sides would have put their case under the watchful eye of the Parliamentary Ombudsman who was an interested party. Waspi had been challenging Pat McFadden, the DWP secretary of state, over his decision not to award any compensation following the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s findings of partial maladministration over the communications informing the women.

Then rather dramatically Mr McFadden on November 11 change his mind after the discovery of an earlier document which had been overlooked for 18 years revealing that attempts to inform the women had failed. Waspi’s lawyers Bindmans are said to have found it -presumably in the exchange of documents before the hearing. See my coverage of the document on this site here.

Before the hearing was dropped Waspi and DWP had the DWP arranged a case management hearing on December 3 with the most extraordinary terms allowing either side to block who would be allowed to attend or have to pay over £300 to obtain the right to attend.

This amounted to secret justice and it is no wonder on the day before the hearing the judge, Mr Justice Swift put out a national statement giving his directions for the case which made it clear it was a public hearing that anybody could attend and there were arrangements for people to hear it remotely.

This scotched the plan for a semi secret hearing so that evening it is clear that lawyers from both sides must have met and agreed to abandon the hearing the next day and Waspi Ltd agreed to pull out alongside the DWP from the two day judicial review.

It is my speculation that it will mean that some arrangement has been agreed under ” a nod and a wink” that the ministry will offer some form of compensation to some of the women. Certainly a seasoned lawyer like John Halford at Bindman’s ,would not have agreed to this without some hint or his client ,Waspi, would have been left in a very precarious position.

Waspi has not been alone in making representations to the government. Enter Edward Romain, a former whistleblower who has set up Blind Justice, a community interest company, to take up injustice cases and has joined joined forces with Cedaw in Law, to fight the case for the women on both discrimination and maladministration. I covered his case against Glyndebourne in an earlier article here. The case is now settled but it also discloses some strange behaviour by lawyers.His website is blindjustice.org.uk .

The day before the planned case review he delivered a recorded letter to Sir Keir Starmer and copied to Pat McFadden staking CedawinLaw’s claim to participate in any mediation process.

He followed this up with a powerful letter to Mr Oliver Towle, a senior lawyer at the Litigation Directorate for the DWP with a copy to the Treasury solicitor.

The letter asks the lawyer to confirm that following the court order that CEDAWinLAW and all other materially affected groups will be included in the consultations from the outset and clarifications of the intended structure and timeline for stakeholder engagement. The letter states

• CEDAWinLAW represents the interests of 3.5 million women affected by State Pension Age changes. ​
• The organization has made formal legal submissions and engaged with public authorities over four years. ​
• It has pursued mediation and presented evidence to Parliament, highlighting ongoing advocacy efforts.

It also cites legal precedents quoting past cases covering natural justice, legitimate expectations, Wednesbury unreasonableness ( ie irrational responses), civil procedure rules and international law.

It concludes:”We respectfully submit that any reconsideration that does not include CEDAWinLAW would be procedurally flawed and open to future challenge. We remain available to assist constructively and can provide additional documentation or legal submissions if required.
We look forward to your confirmation and to contributing meaningfully to the reconsideration process.”

One curious fact, actions by WASPI and CedawinLaw appear to have come to attention of the Chinese government over the last five months.Altogether I have received over 76,000 hits from China from Beijing and 40 other cities across China data scraping my blogs on the pensions issue.

China has one of the lowest retirement ages in the world. Women can retire at 50, men at 60. I wondering whether the Government is thinking of raising it and is looking at the opposition to it in the UK. President Putin tried to raise the pension age for women some time ago but had such opposition from the Babuskas that he backed down -probably the only reversal he made as President.

The full letter to the government lawyer can be read here.

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