Legal Update – 11 November 2025
12th November 2025
DWP concedes its indefensible response can no longer be defended – but what now?
DWP concedes that its indefensible response to Ombudsman’s report on WASPI women can no longer be defended… but what next?
The Pensions Minister announced today in Parliament that the Government’s response to the Ombudsman’s report on maladministration in the communication of changes to State Pension Age is to be withdrawn and ‘reconsidered’.
In a letter to WASPI’s lawyers and the Court the Government also says it is not taking further steps to defend WASPI’s legal challenge to that decision which it says is now ‘academic’ given the reconsideration announcement.
Why has this happened?
In last year’s decision the Government relied on two surveys to argue that its failure to send personalised letters to women affected by the changes would have made no difference to what they knew and that, in any case, most women were aware of, or could have found out, their true State Pension age. Liz Kendall confidently told Parliament there were “two facts—that most women knew the state pension age was increasing and that letters are not as significant as the ombudsman says” and that they meant “that there should be no scheme of financial compensation to 1950s-born women in response to the ombudsman’s report”.
This was, of course, complete rubbish and a gaslighting denial of WASPI women’s lived experience.
To support its position, the Government relied on two surveys to claim that women had not suffered injustice and that compensation would not be appropriate.
WASPI has always maintained that these surveys were not a sound basis for rejecting the ombudsman’s recommendations that women be compensated for the DWP’s maladministration and highlighted that the Minister had not been provided with all the relevant evidence before reaching her decision (including research commissioned by DWP in 2007 that suggest 1950s born women would have read and taken in the contents of personalised letters about their State Pension age).
Today the Government appears to accept that it got at least one of those crucial so-called ‘facts’ completely wrong because officials did not show Ms Kendall DWP-commissioned research that completely contradicted it.
This is a major achievement. Our judicial review is currently due to be heard in just four weeks’ time, on 9 and 10 December 2025. At almost the eleventh hour, the Government has accepted that its response to the Ombudsman is legally indefensible.
The Government has said it will reconsider, and this time the Minister will be shown the withheld report. Why did that not happen in the first place? Why was that basic mistake not admitted when WASPI began its legal case? Why has the reconsideration not already happened?
We do not know the answers to these questions yet. But we do know the Government is desperate to avoid a judge scrutinising its decision-making and so is backpedalling away from the imminent court hearing.
Right now, we need to establish whether the Government will accept that accept that last December’s decision is as riddled with errors as we have always said it is in our claim – not only because of the withholding of the 2007 research. Then we can decide what to ask the Court to do. Our lawyers have sent a letter putting these straightforward questions to the Secretary of State’s representatives. For now, we have told our lawyers to press on with their preparations as before. We will update you once we know more.