“WE WON’T STARVE IN SILENCE”: Heartbroken WASPI mothers in TEARS launch desperate court battle against DWP 😭💔

On 29 January 2026, 1950s-born women were told by the new Secretary of State, Pat McFadden, that hardly any of us have suffered injustice despite years of DWP delay in sending us letters to tell us about changes in our state pension ages and that none of us will be compensated despite the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) forcefully proposing that should happen after its longest-running investigation.  

At the time, WASPI described Mr McFadden as a different DJ playing the same broken record. We stand by that.

The injustices we continue to experience thanks to DWP maladministration have not disappeared simply because a different Secretary of State has come up with yet more reasons to deny them. They remain very real for us. We know we have been wronged and the wrongs must be put right.

Although it is not an easy decision to begin another judicial review to seek a lawful and just decision from the Government on the PHSO’s injustice findings and compensation proposals, we must forge ahead together. The alternative is to accept the unacceptable, or focus only on campaigning to change politicians’ minds. By itself that is very unlikely to achieve much in the short term given the Government’s majority. Mediation has also been repeatedly refused.

We also believe strongly that the Government is wrong. It should simply take responsibility and accept its maladministration caused that injustice, rather than devise ever more sophisticated excuses. Regardless of whether we are ultimately compensated, it is hugely important that injustice is acknowledged and we are not blamed for not having found out our state pension age.

We have therefore launched a new judicial review claim in Court based on the arguments summarised below.

Pressing on with this judicial review will not be easy. We consider our arguments have a real chance of success, but winning is certainly not guaranteed. The Court cannot order that anyone is compensated. It can only rule that the Government’s reasons for rejecting the PHSO’s injustice findings and compensation proposals are not cogent or rational. Such a ruling would force the Government to reconsider and hopefully it would then finally accept there is large-scale injustice – having then run out of reasons to deny it. Even then, compensation is very unlikely to be paid by the present Government unless there is a major change in its thinking. So WASPI will continue to campaign for that in parallel with our judicial review.

We also need to raise more money to make the judicial review practical – despite appreciating how difficult it is for many women to contribute. Although we have been able to launch the judicial review using the fighting fund left over from our last case, we must crowdfund again to pay our lawyers to take the case forward to a hearing and protect WASPI against the Government’s legal costs.

Please stand with us and donate now so we can reach our first fundraising target for our new judicial review case.

More information about the arguments in the latest judicial review follows below. We will explain the procedure in later updates.

What happened with WASPI’s last judicial review?

As now, we challenged the Governments’ rejection of the PHSO’s injustice findings and compensation proposals. Permission for judicial review was granted on all our arguments demonstrating the strength of our case. Days before trial, the DWP admitted it had withheld critical information from Ministers, withdrew its decision to reject the PHSO’s findings and proposals and promised to reconsider. Some (but not all) of WASPI’s legal costs were paid under a settlement agreement. The Government’s new decision was made within the timetable we had forced it to accept.

Why has the Government again rejected the PHSO’s injustice findings and compensation proposals?

Announcing the Government’s 29 January decision, Mr McFadden said “the evidence shows that the vast majority of 1950s-born women already knew that the state pension age was increasing”. He added that we could have found out our own state pension ages – so there was hardly any injustice and we should not be compensated for the DWP’s failures to inform us. His announcement is here and the full reasons for it are here.

What are the arguments in WASPI’s new judicial review?

We know the injustice we have suffered is real – we still experience it daily. We know it must both be acknowledged by the Government and put right.

Our lawyers have explained this to the High Court in a detailed Statement of Facts and Grounds for Judicial Review they have also filed 5,180 pages of evidence. You can read the Grounds here (note, we have had to blank out references to the Government’s response to our solicitors’ letter before claim, as we have not yet been granted permission to publish it).

At the heart of our case is a simple point: The Government is not legally entitled to reject the PHSO’s conclusions on injustice and its remedy proposals without “cogent reasons” (as explained by the courts in cases handled by our legal team such as R (Bradley) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and R (Equitable Members Action Group) v HM Treasury). The Government’s reasons are nowhere near good enough, we say. They are not cogent and many are not even rational. Some are new; the Government has only come up with them now, rather than during the PHSO investigation or even in the first rejection decision.

Our arguments are developed in the Grounds as follows:

·      First, we say that the Government misunderstood the nature of the injustices identified by the PHSO. The PHSO had identified two related but distinct forms of injustice arising from the delayed state pension age notification letters: (i) the loss of opportunities to make informed decisions and act differently; and (ii) a loss of personal autonomy and financial control caused by not having been properly informed. We say the Government has ignored the second category altogether, despite it being well established in the PHSO’s guidance and widespread here; it has treated injustice as existing only where a 1950s-born woman can show that she would probably have acted differently had an earlier letter been sent. The PHSO report could not be clearer, however. For example, sample complainant Ms W’s case was treated by the PHSO as demonstrating that emotional injustice could arise even where additional notice could not realistically have enabled materially different financial choices to be made (and in any case, she considers she could have acted differently).

·      Secondly, the Government’s argument that the PHSO lacked evidence for its conclusions is muddled, incoherent and irrational. The Government argues that the PHSO’s approach was “logically flawed” because many women would not in practice have read, retained or acted upon unsolicited letters. Yet the PHSO never assumed everyone would read and rely on letters. It recognised that individual circumstances varied and that not all women would necessarily have acted differently, though many would have.

·      We also say the Government’s position is inconsistent with the DWP’s own historical evidence and decision-making. DWP research and ministerial submissions from 2006–2007 repeatedly identified low levels of awareness amongst affected women and concluded that targeted personalised letters were both necessary and likely to be effective. The DWP cannot coherently maintain, on the one hand, that failure to send earlier letters constituted maladministration and, on the other, that those same letters would probably have made little practical difference.

·      Then there is the Government’s argument that women who knew in general terms that pension ages were changing ought reasonably to have investigated their own position. We say that mixes up general awareness of pensions policy changes with appreciation that our own pension ages had altered. The PHSO had found — consistently with the DWP’s own contemporaneous research — that many women understood that equalisation was occurring but simply did not realise that they themselves were affected. The DWP’s own actions — including extensive use of direct mail campaigns for pension communications — reinforced how reasonable it was for us to expect that important changes would be communicated personally.

·      As to remedy, we say that the rejection of compensation necessarily falls with the unlawful rejection of injustice, but also that the Government overstated the financial implications of a compensation scheme.

Help us make sure these arguments are heard by a Judge and the Government is held to account for its excuse-mongering and evasion of responsibility for the injustice we have suffered.