The government changed women's pension age and called it progress. Did anyone actually ask you?

I agree Norah Hayes. But I think the brilliant representatives who have spent years fighting and managed to get it to court have been ignored. Before the last GE ministers always imply they are going to sort it. Andy Burnham has previously said he agreed with WASPI women. Now I hear he has said he didn't say anything about payouts or recognition. They all con the electorate until they get into power. I think this has been discussed on here before and many say they were informed in good time prior to the new women's retirement age. And many say they weren't informed in a timely manner. The DWP have apologised for not sending the info to all affected. But that's it. I don't think they will pay out as it's too costly and time consuming. And a blanket payout to all who potentially were affected would be even more costly. So I don't think it will happen. I know I wasn't informed and it has cost me.

Women my age, 65, have had their State Pension delayed by 7 years. This was supposedly to reach parity with our menfolk. Parity is not the case though, as for decades we had lower pay, fewer education, career and promotion opportunities as our working lives took second place to our menfolk's opportunities. The delay in pension age has cost me in the region of £70000 but this doesn’t just affect me but our income as a couple. State Pensions are becoming unaffordable because successive governments have failed to see the snowballing costs and provide for them. This is not my fault but instead of enjoying life on the Pension I earned, I'm using up my savings and cutting back. Worse stll, a dear friend died this year after only 1 year of State Pension after working until she was 65 and dying within a year. This policy robbed her of 5 years of retirememt. How is that fair?

It isn’t fair, and what’s worse is those (like me) who carried on working (because we had to) also paid additional NI. Back in the day, if one chose to continue working after SP age, NI payments stopped. I paid an addition 5 years, no mean amount.

I suppose you could blame the feminist movement. Always wanting equality with men, well we’ve got it. We have to work as long as them.

It's not about equality Kandinsky. Women aren't saying the shouldn't have the same retirement age as men. This is about the lack of informing women in time to prepare for the change. The DWP have acknowledged that this was the case.

When state pensions first came in they were calculated on the premise that recipients would only live for a few years after retiring. Due to free health care life expectancy has greatly improved therefore the age has had to be raised, as is happening all over Europe.
The increase in pension age came into effect in 1995 but the first women to be affected were born in 1995, therefore not in work until at the very earliest aged 15 or 16, allowing fifteen years grace to update pension plans.
Waspi women are not entitled to 5 years extra pension; I could never understand why men had to work five years longer for their pension, as they rarely had career breaks for child rearing and home duties. Equality works both ways. From the 1960s onward there were multiple opportunities for career development, extra education and promotion for those who wanted it, much of it due to Women's Lib and Feminism.

My mother, born 1905, worked until she was 65 and would have worked longer had she been allowed; she would have loved the opportunities open to women nowadays. My father worked until he was 70, and I retired at 65,again compulsorily.

The friend was not robbed of 5 years of retirement; she, like everyone else born after 1950, was not entitled to it.

We are all living longer, and with the state so committed to the burgeoning Welfare Bill, the money has to come from somewhere.

NoraHayes it has been discussed on here, a lot.

To Crossy
That's a point I hadn't even considered. Many people focus on the pension delay itself, but having to continue paying NI for years longer adds another layer to the impact. How did you adjust your plans when you realized you'd be working longer than expected?

I built my working life on a retirement age of 60 and I do understand that SP age probably needed to be a bit older than that.

7 years extra is unacceptable and unfair. Many manual jobs are impossible to do when you are over 60 and women always seem to be negatively treated as we have families and part time work for a good work life balance.

That's a very fair point, Millie22. Most people seem to accept that retirement ages can't stay frozen forever, but seven years is a long time when you've spent decades planning around a particular age. It's easy to talk about numbers on paper, much harder when you're the one having to work those extra years.

Kandinsky

I suppose you could blame the feminist movement. Always wanting equality with men, well we’ve got it. We have to work as long as them.

Kandinsky: so, are you saying that women now have full equality with men?

News to me - be much more specific please. (And don't simply write what your husband has told you to say.)

I’m a Waspi. Born 1958. State Pension Retirement age was 60. Changed to 65. Changed to 66. I never received any written notification of this at all.
I retired at 52 , early, due to many reasons.
The government did me out of 6 years state pension. I’ve learned to live with this however the additional funds would have been put to good use.
I was widowed at 48.
I got the princely sum of approx £50 per year from my late husband!s NI contributions! A pittance in my opinion.
I don’t expect to see anything to compensate me for this as it is too expensive for the government whomever they may be.

Women on the NSP don’t get widows’ pension. On the OSP they did, along with SERPs if they had paid enough in.

People often assume that the NSP is always higher than the old, but forget that no matter how many contributions people make, or what they earned, there is a ceiling. On the OSP you could pay in more and get more back. Many on the OSP get far more than those on the new one, and got it for six more years.

As for ‘equality’, increasing women’s SPA took no account of the fact that there was legalised inequality when many of us started working. Differential pay scales, restrictions on promotion, not being allowed to pay into work pension schemes if you didn’t have a permanent full-time contract were things many 50s women faced, as well as being sacked for getting pregnant and made to leave work on marriage for some. When the changes came in it was too late to undo the systemic damage that means that the ‘gender pay gap’ is still shamefully high.

Padstow13

News to me - be much more specific please. (And don't simply write what your husband has told you to say.)

My husband is currently seriously ill in hospital, so thank you for upsetting me even more.

There are so many ways so many people have lost out on pension, not just state pension.

When I started work if you spent less than 2 years in a job, your occupational pension payments were paid back, your payments only, no interest. A few years later this was changed to 5 years, too late for me, but it affected a lot of men, who also chop and change jobs at the start of their careers

If you were in a money purchase scheme this was frozen at its cash value. In the 1960s I paid several hundred pounds into a money purchase scheme, the euivalent of about £3,000 in real terms when I retired. My pension from that was £10 a year, unchanged since 1968. It was turned into a lump sum of £163 (after tax). Again affects men as well as women. Then, until the 1980s/90s part timers could not join company pension schemes. This also affected mainly women.

Finally many people were made to retire early through 'voluntary' retirement schemes in the 1990s in particular. Losing further occupational pension, often at very short notice, and having to pay voluntarily into their state pension.

Lots of people for all kinds of reasons did not get the pensions they might have.

The increased pension age for women was announced well in advance and implemented incrementally. It was widely publicised at the time and since in all the media. I knew all about it, even though it did not affect me.

It is up to all of us to keep engaged in the world to know what is going on that might affect us, whether it is benefits, or free offers at the local supermarket. There have been threads recently where people have (almost) boasted that they never read news online, never watch the news or read a paper, and frequently never read any official leaflets pushed through a door, which brings me to my only ground of support for WASPI women, which is the one CV2020 mentioned - that they were not sent a formal letter by the government. This should have been done. But otherwise the news was in view.

Women were heavily discriminated against in the work place in the past and are still, but we cannot go from deep discrimination to complete euality like flipping a switch.

9m men 1983-2018 retired at 60 thanks to Thatcher organising the taxpayers paying for their Nat Ins Contributions until aged 65, allowing them to retire at 60 on their workplace pensions.
By 2018, many women, eight years of 50s women, should have been allowed to do the same, but were denied this perk.
So this was never about equality Kandinsky

Kandinsky

Padstow13

News to me - be much more specific please. (And don't simply write what your husband has told you to say.)

My husband is currently seriously ill in hospital, so thank you for upsetting me even more.

Am sorry about your husband Kandinsky
💐

A neighbour of mine is 65 and won’t get her pension until she is 67, her husband who is a few years older got his aged 65 with his bus pass etc., she can’t work because has far worse health problems than her husband.
There can never be any kind of equality here, every case is different, and raising the pension age was never about this, it was about robbing those who paid into a system they were led to believe would reward them for their hard work at 65.
Biggest daylight robbery ever imho.

Those of us who got our SP at 60 should count ourselves very lucky indeed.

Fallingstar

Kandinsky

Padstow13

News to me - be much more specific please. (And don't simply write what your husband has told you to say.)

My husband is currently seriously ill in hospital, so thank you for upsetting me even more.

Am sorry about your husband Kandinsky
💐

What you wrote Padinsky was entirely unacceptable, whether Kadinsky's DH is in hospital or not.

What makes you or anyone on GN, think that all but a very few women in the last 100 years would ever vote according to their husband's wishes. We have a secret ballot and the polling clerks keep it secret.

I do not think in my whole life (I am over 80) I have ever heard a woman say that she took advice from her husband on which party to vote for.

I recall that a woman took the government to court about the unequal State retirement ages, 60 for women, 65 for men and won. The government then had to equalise them. It was cheapest to raise that for women to 65. Entirely predictable and a good example of feminism shooting itself in the foot.

I'm not really sure what OP is arguing. A return to 60?

Born in summer 1955, I was affected by equalisation and saw my SP age change from 60 to 66. I was one of the many, many women who was unaware of the early publicity, leaflets, magazine ads etc, and outside the age range for women who were sent pension forecasts. The PHSO stage 1 report confirms there was never any plan to notify women born after May 1955 what their new SP age was.

I have posted before that I received a Pension Service letter in 2007 (after my DH died) telling me my SP age was 60 when, in fact, it was already 65 and would later increase to 66. It wasn't a question of them making a mistake over my age as it came as a response to a claim for Bereavement Allowance (based on spousal NIC) which is reduced if you are under 55 when widowed. They knew I was 51 as they reduced the BA accordingly so should have known my SPA wasn't 60 but nevertheless told me it was. I wonder how many other women were misinformed?

That said, I have no issue with equalisation. Why shouldn’t women work as many years as men? We tend to live longer and claim our pensions for longer. You only need 35 years for a full SP from a possible working life of say 50 years, so enough years to take time out for family - and many parents and wider family now share caring responsibilities.

What makes no sense is to keep increasing the SP age further and then complain that young people are struggling to find their way into work.

Women’s SP age of 60 was set in 1940, over 85 years ago, when, apart from times of war, many married women did not work outside the home and relied on a husband for financial support. It was set at 60 rather than 65 as most men married women a few years younger than themselves. Before it was set at 60, a man retiring at 65 could not claim a pension for his wife until she was also 65.

The EU directive to equalise pensions was issued in 1978, 48 years ago. I was 23 at the time.

(Council Directive 79/7/EEC of 19 December 1978 on the progressive implementation of the principle of equal treatment for men and women in matters of social security.)

By 1978, 38 years on from 1940, most married women did work outside the home. Few of my contemporaries chose to be SAHMs or for very long. Most worked and managed childcare.

That equalisation didn’t start to come into effect for another 32 years until 2010 was largely the fault of the three Thatcher administrations who ignored the EU directive. It was left to John Major’s government to pass the Pensions Act 1995 to set the ball rolling on equalisation, giving 15 years notice of the change which, in theory, should have been enough.

The PHSO has made it very clear that subsequent governments maladministered the change, particularly from 2004-2007 when the department knew that more than 50% of women affected, still thought their SP age was 60. I was one of them as I had a letter from the Pensions Service telling me it was.

In 2007, the department finally accepted that it needed to issue individual letters but didn’t start sending them until 2009, just one year before the changes started to take effect for the oldest women affected, those born after 5 April 1950.

Today’s government is still making excuses for that with Pat McFadden saying recently in the HoC that had women been sent letters earlier we wouldn’t have read them anyway.

Under the Pensions Act 2007, the State Pension age for men and women was due to be increased to 66 between 2024 and 2026, 67 by 2036, and 68 by 2046. That’s a considerable amount of notice.

It was the Tory LibDem Coalition which did the most damage.

The Pensions Act 2011 sped up the timetable for raising men and women’s State Pension age. Women’s State Pension age increased more quickly to 65 between April 2016 and November 2018. From December 2018 the State Pension age for both men and women increased to reach 66 by October 2020.

Tory Chancellor George Osborne bragged about this saying it was the easiest public expenditure saving he had ever made.

Then the Pensions Act 2014 brought the increase in the State Pension age from 66 to 67 forward by eight years.

Those born after 5 April 1960 will see their SP age start to rise towards 67 this year, significantly earlier than the Pensions Act 2007 originally legislated for.

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7f02e640f0b62305b84929/spa-timetable.pdf

You ask how did I handle it? Had my husband lived, he was four years older than me, he was tentatively planning to retire at 60 and I would have joined him at 56. By then we both would have had enough NIC years to get a full state pension (less contracted out deductions) when the time came. We planned to live on his works pension and savings for four years until I was 60 and my works pension and state pension would kick in (or so I thought). A year later he would turn 65 and receive his state pension. In other words, our post retirement income would increase in stages over five years.

We had so many plans about what we would do with our leisure time when we no longer had to get up at the crack of dawn to go to work. But fate got in the way and he died age 55. I just kept on working. I could have stopped at 60 but I enjoyed working and went on until I was 66. At 70, I still work now although its mostly voluntary with a small amount of paid freelance work.

Does the government EVER ask me about ANYTHING?

News to me - be much more specific please. ( And don't simply write what your husband has told you to say .)

Blimey - what century are you in Padstow ???