Sir Stephen Timms
MP for East Ham · Labour · United Kingdom
“I agree with the hon. Gentleman. If he would like to send me details of that particular case, I will happily look into it. On the subject of people with hearing impairments, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Women and Equalities and I will be meeting the British Sign Language Advisory Board this afternoon.”
“Better outcomes require early identification and support for girls and young women with special educational needs, including dyslexia. That is the aim of the SEND reforms and the development of national inclusion standards.”
“Autistic people and people with ADHD have been struggling to get the right support at the right time. Recommendations from Professor Karen Guldberg’s neurodivergence task and finish group directly informed the SEND reforms that were published earlier this year.”
“The Equality Act 2010 places a duty on public bodies to make reasonable adjustments, so that disabled people are not put at a disadvantage by accessibility challenges.”
“The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. This benefit is there to contribute to the additional costs of disability. Too often, what has happened—my hon.”
“I think we can take the hon. Member’s question as a tacit recognition that in 14 years the previous Government should have done something to fix these problems. The steering group is clear that the provision of cash to meet the additional costs of disability is vital.”
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“The Home Office announced in October a joint review with the Department for Education on how immigration status and no recourse to public funds interacted with free school meals and other education entitlements. What is the status of that review? What conclusions has it reached so far? When is it expected to be complete?”
“When does the Minister intend to take an initiative based on those findings for the benefit of self-employed people?”
“Those trials involved: marketing interventions aimed at people who previously saved, such as those being automatically enrolled while employed, to encourage them to continue their saving; marketing interventions using trusted third parties for the self-employed, such as trade bodies and trade unions, to promote the value of saving and to provide an easy connection to an appropriate savings vehicle; and behavioural prompts, including testing messages combined with prompts through invoicing services or the banking sector to try to encourage self- employed people to think about starting regular saving at a point when they are receiving their income. What has been learned from those activities over the past couple of years? When will the Government publish the findings?”
“The idea of using an opt-out system on tax returns to encourage greater contribution to pensions is an interesting one that merits further consideration.” Can the Minister, following the trials, which began a couple of years ago now, indicate what the Government’s plans are for extending the success of auto-enrolment to the self-employed?”
“The third part of the inquiry, which we will launch later in the year, will look at these issues around auto-enrolment for gig economy workers such as Uber drivers and for self-employed people more generally. The Government launched a series of trials and research exercises around enabling retirement saving for the self-employed at the end of 2018. That followed a report from the Select Committee at the end of 2017, “Self-employment and the gig economy”, which said: “Low levels of retirement saving amongst the self-employed risk storing up grave problems of potential hardship and reliance on the welfare state in later life. While auto-enrolment for employees has been a great success, current structures are not encouraging sufficient pension saving by the self-employed.”
“If they and other gig economy workers are entitled to the minimum wage, they may well also be eligible for auto-enrolment on the terms set out in the order. Auto-enrolment contributions might well need to be paid retrospectively in relation to them. Will the Minister set out what the Government’s view about that is? Are they considering how gig economy workers could be brought into auto-enrolment? Is there a need for legislation to address this, or is it the Government’s view that the existing legislation can do the job? The Work and Pensions Committee has now launched the second stage of our three-stage inquiry to assess the impact of the pension freedoms five years on from their introduction, following the first part, which was on pension scams, which I hope we will be able to produce a report on later this month.”
“The previous Work and Pensions Committee recommended in its auto-enrolment report that, as part of their review, the Government should consider “approaches to increasing contributions beyond the statutory minimum of 8% of qualifying earnings, including mandatory increases in employee and employer contribution rates and means of encouraging greater voluntary contributions”. Can we look forward to progress along those lines in a 2022 pension schemes Bill as well? As the Minister knows, and this has not previously been raised in this debate, the Supreme Court recently found that Uber drivers are workers for the purpose of section 54 of the National Minimum Wage Act 1998. That means that Uber drivers are entitled to a minimum wage for the period when they have the app switched on in the area covered by their licence.”
“Friend the Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda) reminded us from the Front Bench, would see contributions made for all employees aged 18 and over from the first £1 that they earn. When the review was published, the Government said, and the Minister reiterated it this evening, that the ambition was to implement those changes before the mid-2020s. We are now halfway from 2017 to the mid-2020s, and it would be helpful if the Minister was able to give some indication to us of when the legislation necessary to achieve that will be made. Is it the Government’s aim to legislate for those changes in the pensions Bill, which the Minister has said he wants to introduce perhaps next year? Is that when we can expect concrete steps to be made?”
“I understand the case for stability in the course of the pandemic; that is represented by the order and I would not quarrel with that at all. However, the order does raise a number of issues about the Government’s longer-term intentions on auto-enrolment, which others have raised and which the Minister touched on, and I would like to ask him about that. On freezing the earnings trigger, again, £10,000 probably represents a very modest increase in the number of people brought into auto-enrolment. The Government’s analysis refers to another 8,000 people, of whom 72% will be women, but the order does not represent any real progress towards the changes set out in the 2017 review, which, as my hon.”
“At the start of the debate, he said that 95% of high-rise buildings with unsafe ACM cladding have either been remediated or have workers on site doing the job. Can he tell us the actual figures? How many buildings have been remediated? How many buildings have workers on site? My constituents would be very interested to hear those numbers.”
“However, the property managers appear poised to embark on replacing this combustible material at an estimated cost of £30,000 per flat, which they will charge to the leaseholders. They have appointed contractors and paid for preliminary work already, although work has not yet begun in earnest. The material to be replaced is being used in buildings being built at the moment. There is no requirement to replace it, and the residents do not want to fund its replacement, so why is replacement poised to go ahead? The only motivation the leaseholders have been able to identify is to provide fee income for the managers. Will the Minister state clearly today that buildings with B1 certification should not be remediated without agreement of the leaseholders?”
“The combustible material is in a vapour layer within the structure. That material is still being used in buildings being built now, and there has been no suggestion that builders should stop using it. Leaseholders in the development have had no problems in obtaining a mortgage, given the B1 certification. These buildings clearly do not meet the criteria for the Government’s cladding fund. Nevertheless, the property managers made an application for funding to replace this combustible vapour layer. In the case of Upton Gardens, the application has been refused. In the case of Waterside Park, the decision is still awaited, but presumably that will be refused as well.”
“I support Lords amendment 2, and I hope we will be able to vote on the amendments that Members have tabled. I also hope the Government will finally honour the promises to leaseholders that they have been making for the past three years, and this Bill is an opportunity to do that. I want to draw the attention of the House to a problem facing hundreds of my constituents living in flats recently built by Barratt at Waterside Park alongside the Thames and Upton Gardens on the site of the Boleyn Ground, where West Ham used to play. Freeholds have since been bought from Barratt by Aviva. The landlord agent is Mainstay, and the property manager is FirstPort. The buildings in both developments have a B1 EWS1 certificate. There is combustible material in the walling, but the risk is not sufficient to warrant requiring its replacement.”
“There is still a widely held view that religious faith is on the way out, irrelevant, maybe harmful to community wellbeing. The reality is that in this decade, and as has become so clear in the past year, it has been the faith groups that, uniquely, have had both the motivation and the resources to step forward and help. Those have not been found anywhere else. We need to learn the lesson from that and enable faith groups and faith-based organisations to make their full contribution in the years ahead.”
“The community also provided PPE to the local health trust.” Nick, from Christians Against Poverty, wrote of supporting “families with debt problems over the last year, albeit by telephone rather than face to face…working successfully to get families debt free.” I pay tribute to John Kirkby, the remarkable founder of Christians Against Poverty, who announced yesterday that he is to step down after 25 years. I hope the Minister will join me in thanking faith groups for their efforts in supporting communities during the pandemic. I welcome his responses on behalf of his Department to the recommendations in our report—appointing a faith commissioner, promoting the faith covenant, developing and distributing a toolkit, and establishing a faiths advisory council.”
“I would like to thank the House of Commons digital engagement team led by Ben Pearson. Last Friday, it issued a call for evidence ahead of this debate. They had 235 responses reporting how churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and Baha’is have fostered community spirit, provided pastoral support and delivered key services. Canon Hilary Barber of Halifax wrote that the local authority has commissioned faith communities to run food banks and night shelters and is working jointly to promote protecting the NHS and uptake of the vaccine. Amarjit Singh Atwal, in the east midlands, wrote: “The community established a food bank” for “rough sleepers. Before the pandemic it was an average of 80 meals a week. During the pandemic this increased to 300 per week.”
“The report recommended that the Government appoint a faiths commissioner, working across government, to help faith groups relate to government and to make the fullest contribution that they can. We would like Ministers to encourage nationwide adoption of our faith covenant and of a framework that reflects shared values to foster trust and promote effective collaboration. We would like support from the Minister’s Department to go to each UK local authority, with examples of good faith group partnerships, to build an understanding of what works well in practice. We have proposed a new faiths advisory council, chaired by the new faiths commissioner and attended by Ministers and senior civil servants to look strategically at how faith groups can best help in post-covid Britain.”
“On “Improving access to hard to reach groups”, 40% said that that was the case to a great extent and another 39% said that that was the case to some extent. The researchers also asked about negative aspects that are said to characterise faith groups. Asked about: “Expressing socially conservative views which sit uneasily with our equalities obligations”, 2% of councils said that that was the case to a great extent. On “Causing us concern about the possibility of proselytization in the context of partnership working”, only 1% felt that that was the case. Those old fears of the pitfalls of working with faith groups simply did not materialise last year. Almost all the councils want to build on those new partnerships in future.”
“Suddenly what our all-party group had been promoting had come about. It has been a very positive experience for councils. One council officer told the researchers: “My personal admiration for faith groups has gone through the roof, just in terms of their commitment there. We as a local authority didn’t know what we were getting into. And they have got involved with smiles on their faces and they’ve done it professionally.” The researchers put to the councils a list of characteristics and asked them to characterise their experience of their partnerships “to a great extent”, “to some extent”, “not very much”, “not at all” or “don’t know”. Positive characteristics scored very highly. On “Adding value because of their longstanding presence in the local community”, 60% of councils said that was the case to a great extent.”
“More than two thirds of the councils surveyed reported an increase in partnership working with faith groups and 91% described their experience with faith groups as “very positive” or “positive”. It has become clear that what anecdotally appeared to us to be happening when the pandemic began is a reality across the country. Faith groups and faith-based organisations have been integral to the civil society response to the pandemic, opening up buildings and food banks, running networks, sharing information, befriending, collecting, cooking and delivering food and providing volunteers. Across the UK, nearly 60% of councils have been working with church-based food banks during the pandemic; 24% have been working with mosque-based food banks; 11% have worked with food banks in Gurdwaras, and 10% with food banks in Hindu temples.”
“Over the summer, with support from the Sir Halley Stewart Trust, the Trussell Trust and the Good Faith partnership, the all-party group commissioned the Faiths and Civil Society Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London to research those council-faith group partnerships. Questionnaires were sent to all 408 UK local authorities and 48% filled them in and returned them. Fifty-five in-depth interviews with council leaders and faith-based projects were conducted across 10 local authority areas. Our report, “Keeping the Faith” was published in November, and I thank Professors Chris Baker and Adam Dinham of Goldsmiths and Greg Smith and the research team for all their work. They found a big increase in the number and the depth of partnerships between local authorities and faith groups.”
“But then I found an email from the Mayor of Newham, Rokhsana Fiaz, saying, “If you come across people without food over the holiday weekend, you should email the vicar of Ascension Church, Royal Docks, before 10 in the morning for a food parcel to be delivered later in the day.” I did not have any better ideas, so I gave it a try, and both my constituents received their food parcels. My local council has never worked in partnership with faith groups before; something unusual was going on. In my constituency, Bonny Downs Baptist Church, Highway Vineyard Church, Ibrahim Mosque, Manor Park Christian Fellowship and City Chapel have all done a superb job, supported by Newham Council. Similar reports started to come in from elsewhere; the Bishop of Durham told me that a lot of the covid emergency response in his diocese was from faith groups.”
“FaithAction, the APPG’s secretariat, is increasingly drawing those councils together to network and learn from one another, together with faith groups in their areas. However, in the last year, things have moved on to a different level. It came home to me that something unusual was happening on the morning of Good Friday last year. While sitting at home going through emails, I found two from constituents saying, “I don’t have any food. What should I do?” We have all become familiar with referring people to food banks over the past 10 years, but I knew that they would all be shut over the Easter weekend, so I did not know how to answer those constituents.”
“As a result, however, communities miss out on really valuable contributions that the groups could be making, so we came up with the idea, which was suggested by my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), of a faith covenant. The covenant sets out ground rules for co-operation between faith groups and local councils to make clear what each should expect of the other, to try to build up confidence on both sides and support them to work together. The first council to draw faith groups in its area together to sign up to the covenant was Birmingham City Council. It happened at Birmingham central library in December 2014, and it was a good start; Birmingham is the biggest local authority in Europe. Another dozen councils have signed up since then, covering between them about 10% of the UK population.”
“When we started, we held a series of meetings with faith-based groups contributing to welfare to work, to health and wellbeing and to work with young people—recognising that most youth work in Britain now is undertaken by faith groups—and groups working on international aid. It quickly became clear from those discussions that the groups often had a problem with their local council. Councils suspected that the groups were only really interested in trying to convert people, or that any service they provided would be biased in favour of their own members. In any case, from the perspective of a hard-pressed council officer, faith groups are difficult: if they work with one of them, will they offend the others? After all, these are rather odd people; they believe in God—far simpler not to get involved with any of them.”
“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for granting this debate. I hope that it will draw attention to the extraordinary scale and value of faith groups’ contributions in response to the pandemic, and that we will consider how to make more of the potential of faith-based groups working alongside local and national Government. I chair the all-party parliamentary group on faith and society, established in 2012. Our aim is to support faith-based contributions to communities, to help make those contributions better known and, where we can, to help remove hurdles to realising their full potential.”
“I do not quite understand the point that the Minister is making. As it stands, Government policy is to reduce universal credit by £20 a week from April. Surely it is perfectly legitimate for Members of this House to draw attention to that.”
“It estimates that the cost to the Government of those eligible for but not receiving pension credit is “£4 billion a year in increased NHS and social care spending.” That is a powerful reminder that scrimping on social security imposes large additional costs elsewhere. The British Association of Social Workers has pointed out that the start of real-terms working-age social security cuts in 2010 marked the start of a big surge of children being taken into care, imposing very large new costs on the Exchequer. We need to ensure that the social security system has the resources to do the job that all of us agree it should do. That means maintaining the £20 a week rise in universal credit for at least another year, and ensuring that legacy benefit claimants can, at last, get extra help as well.”
“That is the evidence that the Secretary of State said last week that she had not seen. It is very clear, and I hope the Minister will reflect on it. Unpaid carers have borne an extraordinary burden during the pandemic. Carer’s allowance is going to rise under this order by 35p per week. Carers UK is calling for it to increase by £20, like universal credit. The standard minimum guarantee in pension credit will be raised, which is welcome, but take-up of pension credit remains much too low. The Minister for Pensions wrote to the Committee last week with an estimate of 63% for pension credit take-up. The charity Independent Age has called today for a new written strategy on pension credit uptake, including trial automatic enrolment.”
“She pays £1.50 or £2 for what used to cost her £1. She feels very hurt that she has had no extra help for those extra costs. Others have to pay supermarket delivery charges of £4 or £5 a time, and another £4 if they buy less than the minimum £40 order. That is a big chunk out of an income of £74.70. The Select Committee’s coronavirus survey last year showed that people claiming disability benefits have substantial additional costs, such as extra cleaning and carers’ protective equipment. Last week, the Disability Benefits Consortium, in a new survey of disabled people claiming legacy benefits, which my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston referred to, found that 82% have had to spend more than normal during the pandemic and two thirds have had to go without essentials at some point over the past year.”
“He said that it was to “benefit over 4 million of our most vulnerable households”— the 4 million claiming universal credit and working tax credit at the time. All the other equally vulnerable house- holds, and many more vulnerable than those 4 million, have had no extra help at all. This order increased disability-related benefits by 0.5% at most. Should disabled people have had some extra help during the pandemic? The Secretary of State told the Select Committee last week that she was “not aware specifically of extra costs that would have been unduly incurred” by disabled people during the pandemic. I spoke to a constituent—a disabled single parent with two daughters, one of whom is disabled. She used to search for bargains in local markets and supermarkets. During the pandemic, she has had to stay safe and not do that.”
“Those benefits include support for disabled people, people with health conditions, for carers…We recommend that…the Department should immediately seek to increase the rates of relevant legacy benefits by the equivalent amount.” Since then, the Government have steadfastly refused. The Prime Minister told the Liaison Committee that it is because the Government “want everybody to move on to universal credit.” However, until two weeks ago, people receiving severe disability premium were prevented by law from doing so. It has been argued recently, against the increase in legacy benefits, that the universal credit rise was to help people claiming for the first time, rather than those already claiming, but that was not what the Chancellor said in announcing the increase on 20 March 2020.”
“Citizens Advice told us that “having a stable regular income is the best way to support people to budget and manage their money.” The attraction for the Treasury, of course, would be the hope of withdrawing the increase without people noticing. It would not work. People claiming benefits other than universal credit and working tax credit have seen, as we have been reminded, no increase at all. In our report in June, as the hon. Member for Glasgow East reminded us, we recommended increasing legacy benefits by the same amount. The report said: “that does not mean that the Government should simply ignore the needs of those people who are claiming—through no fault of their own—benefits which rely on outdated and complex administrative systems.”
“The Joseph Rowntree Foundation quotes a woman in London saying: “That £20 is often the difference between light and heat or no light and heat. If you don’t have gas, you can’t cook.” That is what many people have been up against during the pandemic. That support must not be withdrawn next month. The report also looked at the idea that has been floated of removing the increase but giving instead a lump sum—perhaps £1,000, equivalent to a year’s worth of the increase. The Committee is strongly opposed. It is a very bad idea, and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions made it clear to the Committee last week that she rightly opposes it.”
“In its report this morning, which has been referred to, the Work and Pensions Committee unanimously, on a cross-party basis, called on the Chancellor, as others already have in this debate, to extend the increase for at least a year. We are joined in that call by lots of organisations, as well as by the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), who I see in the Chamber, and the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb), both former Secretaries of State; by many other Government Members —we have just heard from the right hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale); and by the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, chaired by the noble Lord Forsyth.”
“I think he was kind of hinting—saying, “Well, don’t worry; it is not really going to happen.” But the answer to that problem is not to suggest that other Members of the House should not be talking about the issue; it is for the Government to make a clear statement that they are not going to go ahead with their current policy, which is to cut the benefit in April. I hope we do not have to wait until the Budget, which is still another three weeks away, before we have an announcement about what exactly the Government’s policy is. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation says that withdrawing the temporary increase will risk sweeping half a million more people, including 200,000 more children, into poverty.”
“The Resolution Foundation says much the same, coming up with a figure for social security spending that is around £34 billion lower in 2023-24 than if the 2010 system had remained in place. People claiming universal credit and working tax credit had a temporary increase of £20 a week. That costs about one sixth of the real-terms cut in annual working-age benefits since 2010—less than 3% of overall pandemic support. The Minister was right to say that people are scared at the prospect of losing the £20-a-week increase.”
“I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) and I congratulate him on his appointment. This order is an annual routine, but this year is different: the number claiming universal credit has more or less doubled since last March; we are still in a global pandemic; and the order would dramatically cut the universal credit standard allowance. We have already been reminded by my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) that for four years, from 2016 to 2020, people claiming around half the benefits covered by this order had their incomes frozen: they were no longer connected at all to the cost of living. In 2018, the House of Commons Library estimated that, this year, working-age social security spending would be £37 billion less than in 2010 in real-terms 2018-19 prices.”
“Can the Minister assure us that the Department has learnt its lessons and that similar mistakes, covering up damaging impacts of its policies on some claimants, will not be repeated in the future?”
“The DWP should advise individuals to check their circumstances, and should provide instructions for how to do this; Within three months of this report, review and report back about how other individuals who believe they have suffered an injustice as a result of the maladministration we have found can raise any concerns with the DWP and have them considered”. Neither of those things has happened so far. It will soon be two years, let alone three months, since the ombudsman published that report. I have given the Minister notice of this question. Can he explain to us how the Department now plans to fulfil its obligations? There is no doubt that the Department’s claims about the state pension reforms were misleading. They misled members of the public, potentially seriously, and denied them the opportunity to act to safeguard their position.”
“This is an injustice for those who wished to plan for the future and might have been negatively affected.” In addition to compensating the individuals and communicating with the Committee, the ombudsman recommended: “Within three months of this report, review and report back to us on the learning from this investigation, including action being taken to ensure that affected individuals receive appropriate communication from the DWP about their state pensions. In particular, the DWP should ensure that their literature clearly and appropriately references that some individuals, who have large GMPs and reach State Pension Age in the early years of the new State Pension, may be negatively affected by the changes.”
“The Department has not fully acknowledged the negative consequences to the pension reforms over the long term. Its literature reassures people that notional losses will be offset and that they will not lose out, but that will not be true for some. The ombudsman says: “The DWP’s actions, therefore, may have provided false reassurance and reduced the incentive for these people to find out about their future pension situation.”
“By failing to do so, DWP were not open and accountable and failed to seek continuous improvement…this amounts to maladministration.” The ombudsman found that the DWP had failed to make its external communications clear and that “there were some individuals who might financially lose out over the long term from the transition of the second state pension to the new State Pension—specifically in relation to the ending of indexation in relation to the second state pension/Guaranteed Minimum Pension.” It also concluded that there is an injustice to members of the public who were not aware of the possible negative impacts of the removal of the second state pension and its relationship with the GMP. Up to 2 million people have reached state pension age since 2016. DWP literature has not told them that the 2014 reform could harm them over time.”
“In addition, the NAO reported on the policy in the same year.” However, both those events took place after the legislation had been passed, not before. Both concluded that the DWP provided insufficient information to people about potential negative impacts. The ombudsman, I believe, is right that “DWP should have acted on the feedback they received through the Work and Pensions Committee and NAO reports.”
“It implied that people will offset losses through additional national insurance contributions. The permanent secretary also wrote: “A detailed account of the change was provided in a response to a” parliamentary question “on 6 January 2014 and is attached for reference”, but that answer does not make it clear that some people would lose out. Even if someone affected had seen that answer, which is unlikely, it would not have helped them to understand the impact on their own pension. The permanent secretary wrote: “More generally, the policy, and how it was communicated, was examined by the Work and Pensions Select Committee in its investigation into Understanding the new State Pension in 2016.”
“The permanent secretary wrote: “As was clear from publication of the Government’s White Paper in January 2013, it was an intrinsic feature of the new State Pension that the old regime of additional State Pension and contracting out, along with its various forms over the years, would be replaced by a new, simpler single-tier system. It was a fundamental feature of the changes that the withdrawal of additional State Pension meant also the withdrawal of GMP indexation.” The ombudsman’s report highlighted that the White Paper did not say that those who had reached state pension age and could no longer add qualifying years would lose out from the changes. The White Paper gave the impression that people would be able to offset the increase in national insurance contributions that they will pay over the rest of their working lives.”
“It should focus on identifying the individuals affected, assessing their potential losses, and communicating with them.” The permanent secretary also wrote that, in addition, the ombudsman “recommended that their reports into the matter were shared with the Select Committee and we have sent your office copies of these documents today.” The report was finalised on 30 September 2019, and it was sent to the Committee on 28 August 2020, and that was only in response to my request for an update. I also asked how much the Department knew of the negative impact of the policy on individuals and how it was communicated to Parliament.”
“We are currently awaiting the” ombudsman’s “comments on this.” The ombudsman will have to decide whether publishing a factsheet meets its recommendations—I must say that I have my doubts—but it certainly falls well short of what the Work and Pensions Committee previously called for. It said: “Government should not rely on general awareness campaigns or happenchance in promoting that understanding.”
“Last August, the permanent secretary at the DWP replied to a letter from the Committee on that subject. He confirmed that compensation of £500 and £750 had been paid to the two people who had raised the complaint with the ombudsman, as the ombudsman had recommended. I asked for an update on responding to being found guilty of maladministration. In response, the permanent secretary wrote that the ombudsman “also recommended…that we invite others who believe they have suffered a similar injustice as the two individuals to come forward to have their cases considered.” That was the ombudsman’s recommendation. The permanent secretary wrote: “We propose to respond…by publishing a factsheet on GOV.UK and I attach a draft.”
“The ombudsman concluded: “DWP was aware the pension changes could negatively affect people with long periods of contracting out who were due to reach State Pension Age shortly after the new State Pension was introduced…DWP failed to provide clear, accurate and complete information through its pension forecasts, impact assessments and other literature…despite being warned by both the National Audit Office and the Work and Pensions Select Committee that better communication was needed for those with long periods of contracting out…some individuals were not aware that they might need to consider seeking independent financial advice and might need to make alternative provision for their retirement.” The concern is still being raised that those problems are not yet being properly addressed.”