Liz Jarvis

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on an issue that is incredibly important to thousands of women and their families in my constituency. I pay tribute to the WASPI campaigners who are in the Public Gallery, and all my constituents who have campaigned tirelessly on the issue. This debate is about justice, fairness and doing what is right. Liberal Democrats have said all along that we support fair and fast compensation for all the women who were unfairly impacted by the changes to the state pension age. They include my constituent Mary; instead of retiring and receiving a pension in 2016 when she reached 60, as she had been expecting to do all her working life, she found herself having to live on virtually nothing for six years. Ill health following breast cancer, combined with the side effects of chemotherapy, left her too tired to do very much at all. Then there is Karin. Karin’s life was upended when she took voluntary redundancy in 2016, believing she had three years until her state pension, only to discover that she had six years to wait. The unexpected delay left her struggling financially while caring for an elderly mother, a severely disabled sister and young grandchildren. Karin is deeply disillusioned with the Government’s decision to ignore the ombudsman’s finding, and frankly, who can blame her? She feels that lifelong injustices faced by women of her generation—from being denied equal workplace rights after having children, to the state pension age changes—have been systematically ignored.