LABOUR’S candidate for Redditch has welcomed Labour’s offer of pay-outs to women who lost out on years of state pension payments when their retirement age was raised.

Jeremy Corbyn has said society owes a “moral debt” to those women, which includes more than 5,000 in Redditch.

The party’s policy to reimburse the women has been estimated to cost £58 billion.

Earlier, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) criticised Labour’s plans, saying that many of the so-called Waspi women are “actually quite well off” and that the party has shown a “decisive lack of priorities”.

Questioned on Labour’s policy, which was not costed in the party’s manifesto, Mr Corbyn said: “We owe a moral debt to these women.

“They were misled. They’ve lost a lot of money.

“They are dedicated people to their communities and their families, and they’re very angry about the way they’ve been treated.”

Candidate for Redditch Rebecca Jenkins said: “This is about consideration for those who have paid into the system all their lives and made this country what it is, only to be hung out to dry by a Tory Government that put the interests of the richest first.”

She added “It is possible with Labour, because Labour is not on the side of the billionaires and the bankers, we are on the side of the people.”

However, director of the IFS, Paul Johnson, raised reservations about the Labour Party’s proposal.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Mr Johnson said the policy’s estimated cost of £58 billion is “a very, very large sum of money indeed”.

He added: “I think there are two interesting things about that, one is the sheer scale of it, and of course it immediately breaks the promises they made in their manifesto just last week only to borrow to invest.

“So, they would need even more than their £80 billion tax rises if they wanted to cover that.

“The other, I suppose, is just a statement of priorities or decisive lack of priorities, because there’s so much money for so many things, but they’re not finding money, for example, to reverse the welfare cuts for genuinely poor people of working wage."

Women expecting to retire at 60 were told they would have to wait longer when changes to the state pension age were accelerated in 2010.

In 2018 the retirement age for women rose to 65, in line with men.

Waspi women, the Women Against State Pension Inequality, argue that they were not given enough time to prepare for the changes.

Labour has said it would make individual payments averaging £15,380 to the 3.7 million women it claims were affected by the changes to the state pension age.