WASPI Women - getting compensated

Are we meant to be shocked at the idea of missing out on four months worth of pension payments? My retirement age got bumped up from 65 to 68. Why is missing out on four months of pension payments so awful? You had to work for FOUR MORE MONTHS?!?! 😮

Houses in my town have more than quintupled in real terms since 2001. Where’s my compensation for the extra £500k I’m owed for not being able to buy a house before it got expensive? University grants were phased out just before I started university. Where’s my compensatory £5k that I unfairly missed out on? At work the final salary pension scheme closed a month before I joined it. Why don’t I get a payout?

There was a second change in 2011. That resulted in a spectrum of differing retirement ages for a tranche of 1950s women with incredibly unfair cliff edges. I missed out on four months pension payments because I was born eight hours too late!

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

But the retirement ages were not complicated. You could easily ring HMRC and simply request a pension entitlement letter sent to you personally about your own pension, which is what my mother and my MIL and everyone else I know did.

I was able to check in 2006 and 2007 my retirement age and whether I needed to pay voluntary contributions towards my qualifying years with the pre-2011 HMRC pages on the gov.uk website (as well as speaking to HMRC by phone). There was a whole load of information on the gov.uk website in the 2000s about this and about pensions entitlements. It didn’t just appear in 2011!

@catontheironingboard I'm not sure whether you're referring to the Waspi issue or to my issues with my husband's pension when you say 'yes you could check it for yourself', but as there wasn't much in the way of information available on the internet back in 2011 I'll assume you're referring to me. If so I've failed to state my point clearly.

Even if information is clear and comprehensible, it's a logical fallacy to infer that that means anyone who can be bothered can easily apply it to their own situation.

In my case I don't dispute that information was out there. But in order to apply it to my own situation I needed details of how my husband's pension was made up. That information was not in my possession nor in anyone's gift. Worse still, confidentiality rules prevented HMRC from sharing it with me because it was to do with someone else's pension, not my own. I wrote to HMRC twice and phoned them three times before I found someone who could answer my questions. I mentioned that as an example of how difficult it can be to get to the bottom of what your entitlement is. It's not always that complex, of course, but it's naïve to assume that because your position is easy to establish then everyone else's is too.

Part of the reason I didn't have the information about my husband's pension is that the contributions in question were made long before I met him, when I was a single woman without a husband to fall back on, and well used to taking responsibility for myself. I did that for thirty years, with a successful career ironically partly in the Inland Revenue, before marrying later in life and taking responsibility for him as well. I specialised in tax rather than in pensions but I am well used to reading and interpreting legislation, and I was genuinely surprised to realise that it was going to be impossible for me to calculate my entitlement. I'm puzzled that you seem to think that if I had tried harder or taken more responsibility it would have been a breeze.

I also find it easy to believe that there were women who were informed and who planned responsibly for their retirement, but who were significantly and disproportionately disadvantaged by the accelerated timetable brought in at a time when they were already close to retirement, when there was simply not enough time left for them to put any new plans in place.

That’s the category I fall into. I had literally two years notice that my pension age was increasing by three years. I might have dreamed this but I seem to remember that as a result of the 2011 debacle future pension changes must now legally have to give those affected ten years’ notice.

Same. Except my kids are older than yours: GenX and Millennial.

Yes, you could check it for yourself. For a start, you could ring HMRC and discuss it with them. And you could also do what I also did, which is look up all the information on their website and compare it to your own situation. It was extremely clear and comprehensible. There is no getting around the fact that the information was out there and it’s simply not being a responsible adult to sit there waiting for your pension for forty years+ without taking any steps to verify what your entitlement was.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t have a husband to fall back on, and was more than used to taking responsibility for myself? Isn’t that what people of that generation are always claiming younger people lack? Self determination and personal responsibility.

@bestcatlife l know right. Retiring at 60 or even 66 with a pension sounds lovely. Sadly l won't be allowed to do that as lm too far down the pyramid scheme in effect

I find it somewhat ironic that posters here are castigating Waspi women for not knowing something that was readily available, whilst at the same time displaying a lack of knowledge about the different categories of Waspi women, the nature and timing of the changes made, and the content of the Ombudsman's report, all of which are currently readily available.

There also seems to be a lack of understanding about what information was actually available back then. There was no going online to check your pension forecast. There was only write in, wait for someone to reply, and hope that the reply when it finally arrived was accurate. There was no way you could check it for yourself without a deep understanding of how the system worked.

I find it easy to believe that there were women who were not fully informed through no fault of their own. Knowing that changes are happening is not the same as fully understanding how they are going to affect you personally. The previous State pension system was horrendously complex (indeed, this is one of the reasons it was scrapped). It's hard to appreciate just how complex, but my personal experience is that I was completely unable to work out how my pension was adjusted after my husband's death because it involved knowing how his pension had been made up, which wasn't information that simply wasn't available to me because it was his pension and not mine. It took me two letters (the first of which never received a reply) and three phone calls to track down someone capable of explaining how his age, his pension contributions, and the contracted out element of his pension resulted in a figure which was then not directly payable to me but instead added to my pension entitlement, meaning that it was then further affected by the contracted out element of my own pension. I am reasonably financially astute and computer literate and there was no way I could have worked that out for myself even in this information age.

I also find it easy to believe that there were women who were informed and who planned responsibly for their retirement, but who were significantly and disproportionately disadvantaged by the accelerated timetable brought in at a time when they were already close to retirement, when there was simply not enough time left for them to put any new plans in place.

I don't think the Waspi campaign has done anyone any favours by calling for compensation for all women affected in any way, but that doesn't detract from the fact that many women were badly treated and deserve compensation.

Your money was what went to the pensioners at the time.

Those were the pensioners who had lived and persevered through two world wars and dreadful times. And you paid them a pittance in their old age.

The current generation of workers are far more generous to today’s pensioners than you ever were. Yet many of today’s pensioners - who were far, far more privileged than their preceding generations - are holding their hands out for more.

This. And you are now happy to take this knowing your own children and grandchildren will be scraping to pay this to you. Disgusting. Very very typical of the entitlement of today’s ’old people’ boomer generation. I am ashamed and embarrassed for you. Perhaps you will like to explain to the younger ones of today how this will benefit them in the future?

At the time, they needed the older people out of the workforce to make way for the younger generations coming up behind them.

The original state pension was set at an age above that of another average man's life expectancy - thus the plan was that most men would never get one. I'm not sure what the provision/plans were for women, if any. Quite possibly they only saw the men as needing an income back then, with their wives 'tagged on' as an accessory.

I don't know if that was done as they wanted to reward people for living a (for then) long life, get rid of people who were perceived as 'past their sell-by date' out of the workplace or possibly the people who tended to live longer were those in less manual occupations, such as those who were setting the rules for who got pensions...

Either way, I agree: the idea now that the state would pay you an income from when you're 60 for what could easily be another 2, 3 or even 4 decades, sounds insanely attractive!

Honestly there are no words.

the government didn't plan, they didn't account for the rising older population. They ignored this large fact and could have put money aside instead of which its workers paying pensions today and not enough workers so there has had to be cuts and the age increased.

If the government had planned, put some money away, invested money for the future, the age wouldn't have had to be raised, the money would be their now to pay for he pensions of record number pensioners.

If in the 1979 the government had started "nest" as an option to continue to retire at 65, this could have been an option, people would have had the choice. It would have given 40 years - which is a life time of working, to put extra away and keep retirement at the same age for those that choose that option

You could very easily have discovered this for yourself if you’d paid attention. The onus is on you to take charge of your own affairs and pension planning; what more could the government have reasonably done to ‘tell’ you? The information was all out there. Your lack of self-responsibility shouldn’t be someone else’s burden.

Don’t get me wrong i’d be pissed off at having to work till 66 instead of of 60

but I’m not seeing the need for compensation

They shouldn’t be compensated. Anyone who claims they didn’t know about the changes either lived under a rock, or is showing a degree of incompetence and inability to plan for their future that they should be embarrassed to admit to.

The idea of retiring at 60 is just .... wow 😮

You didnt listen to the radio or read a newspaper during that time? Yes I believe you are lying.

So do you think we should just accept that women will never have the same earning power as men and lower our expectations of (and trust in) them accordingly? Maybe employers can take that into account when setting salaries for men and women doing the same job and deciding on who gets the promotions?

It's always worth their while remembering that a man would give them 5 more years of work and experience for their investment in his training, so John is already looking like a much better prospect for hiring than Jane from the outset, when they look at the bottom line.

What about women who never have children? Should they start off with a nominal SPA of 60, but then have it increased to 65, so they can be 'one of the blokes' as soon as they hit the menopause without having become a mother? Obviously they will still have missed out on the benefits of employers being able to treat them preferentially them because of their longer 'lifespan' in the workplace, as nobody could have known that they definitely wouldn't have children, but it was always a 'risk'.

What about men who end up as widowed/single dads or become SAHDs for a certain period whilst their kids are young? Should they be considered as 'honorary women' and get to retire at 60 as well, after having returned to the workplace once their kids are older? Or should Larry, who was widowed at 30 with 5 children, be expected to work for five years longer than Carrie, who never married, never had children and quickly rose to (and stayed at) the top of her profession until retirement?

They should compensate them and anyone else caught up in the utter madness of equalising retirement.

Even today women earn 13% less than a man doing the same job and women with children generally take time off to look after children. So how can a women retire with the same pension as a man and hence how can women be expected to retire at the same age?!

Why weren’t you regularly checking your pension entitlement? I’ve been checking it every few years since I started full time work in my twenties: to check the required qualifying years and projected retirement dates and so on. The Blair/Brown government reduced the number qualifying years down to 30 (from 39), and then the Coalition/Tories put them back up again: every few years I got letters from HMRC about the periods of time when you could buy back extra qualifying years/voluntary contributions, and when these windows closed. Every time I got these I checked my pension entitlement to see if I needed to make extra contributions and what my retirement date would be. (HMRC regularly sent letters about voluntary contributions periods at the time.) You could check your pension entitlement by phone; or online — even in the mid-2000s. So even if you had somehow missed the age equalisation for women in the 90s, surely you were checking these things? (Every time you got a letter from HMRC it had details of how you could check your entitlement!)

In 2007 the new Pensions Act raised the pension age to 68 for my cohort. Whenever I got a letter from HMRC about qualifying years and voluntary contributions, it had my new projected pension age in the letter. It was extremely annoying to regularly see that “68”, but I was well aware of that increase in 2007, because I have read ALL my letters from HMRC ever since I started work!
The Coalition govt brought the planned increases in pension ages forward in 2011, but weren’t you checking your pension entitlement anyway, especially if you knew you would be retiring within the next 15-20 years?

This is what I simply don’t get. If you were not aware of these changes, were you just taking absolutely no responsibility for your own financial planning? Even if you have always been on PAYE all your life, and worked constantly since 18 — your tax code gets changed regularly; HMRC often miscalculate tax; surely in that time you were getting letters from them with your tax code every year, the occasional over or underpayment, and occasionally logging in to Government Gateway (or the previous online system they had); and while you were in there you check your pension forecast as well?

Most people actually do this every so often. I’ve been doing it since I was 20, and I’m not far off 50 now! And people who are self employed, have been carers or SAHPs or have gaps in their employment history have to do this ALL THE TIME to sort out qualifying years, underpayments and overpayments, and get their tax code adjusted.

Even these days, when HMRC doesn’t send as many paper letters as before, you will still get payslips and P60s from work showing NICs and benefits, letters from HMRC about your tax code every year, etc. etc. Who simply never checks anything to do with their future pension and state pension entitlement, (especially over a period of 30 years when the qualifying years kept changing)? It’s a complete abdication of personal responsibility to say “I wasn’t told”. You’re meant to check! If you weren’t doing it, why on earth not? Most people simply can’t afford not to take proactive responsibility for their own financial future.

My mum is of WASPI age, and is a hoarder who never opened her post — especially financial post — for literally years at a time, and even she knew she had to proactively check her state pension entitlement every so often!

100% this. Surely it’s just the responsible and sensible thing to do?!

With regards to budgeting, wouldn’t you just remain work until you could afford to retire with enough to keep you going until you reached the new state pension age? Not ideal if you hoped to retire earlier but only the same as what everyone else has to do.