Before this year’s general election, several senior Labour figures had backed the campaign and Sir Keir himself signed a pledge for “fair and fast compensation” in 2022.
In 2019, Angela Rayner, now the deputy prime minister, told the : “They [the government] stole their pensions…we’ve said we’d right that injustice and within the five years of the Labour government we’ll compensate them for the money that they’ve lost.”
In the first Prime Minister’s Questions since the government announced they would not be providing compensation, veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott said the Waspi women had “fought one of the most sustained and passionate campaigns for justice that I can remember, year in, year out”.
“Does the prime minister really understand how let down Waspi women feel today?” she asked.
Ian Byrne, an independent MP, said the women were owed compensation for the “injustice done to them” and urged the prime minister to hold a vote on the subject.
And Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said Labour had “played politics” with the group by previously supporting their campaign.
“She [Rayner] promised to compensate them in full… now they admit we were right all along.”
Responding to the criticism, Sir Keir said the delays to telling women about pension changes were “unacceptable”.
“I’m afraid to say that taxpayers simply can’t afford the tens of billions of pounds in compensation when the evidence shows that 90% of those impacted did know about it, that’s because of the state of our economy.”
Following PMQs, a No 10 spokesman said that since winning the election, the government had “had the chance” to look at the ombudsman’s report, which said the women “faced no direct financial loss as a result of the delays”.
The government has said compensation could cost up to £10.5bn.
But Ms De Spon said many Waspi women “didn’t know” about the pensions changes, and added that even to this day women were saying: “I never even received a letter, let alone when I received a letter.”
She added that former Conservative Chancellor George Osborne had saved more than £180bn by raising the state pension age and “boasted that it was easiest money he had ever saved”.
“We’re asking for a tiny fraction of that back as compensation for government failure,” she said.
The Waspi campaign also accused the prime minister of spreading “dangerous misinformation” by saying 90% of women had been aware of changes to the pension age.
“The fact that 90% of women had some general awareness of potential changes in the future does not mean they knew this would impact them personally,” said Waspi chair Angela Madden.
