War widows who remarried after their husbands died will be given a one-off payment of almost £90,000 to compensate for years of loss of income.

The Government has announced that widows of military personnel who had their pensions stopped after they remarried will be eligible for £87,500 as part of a scheme to support those whose spouses’ death was attributable to service.

It comes after years of fighting by the War Widows Association on behalf of widows who were denied their right to a lifelong pension because they remarried between 1973 and 2015.

Changes to the current pension scheme for war widows meant that from April 2015, all those who qualified for the pension would receive it for life. However, the changes were not applied retrospectively.

As part of a campaign by The Telegraph to reimburse the widows affected by this change, of which there are thought to be around 200, the Archbishop of Canterbury urged the Government to “put right” what he deemed a “very great wrong”.

The Most Rev Justin Welby told The Telegraph in 2021 that the widows had been left in “a cruel and unjustifiable situation” after finding love again.

Judy Shepherd, now 72, and Jenny Morris, now 75, became friends in their 20s after both their husbands, who were RAF pilots, were killed while flying together in a mid-air collision over Wettenhall, a village near Crewe.