WASPI Women - getting compensated

Around 3 million women were affected in some way by this and some men too, but women (as ever) got hit hardest. Shouldn't it have been worthy of a TV campaign? Putting flyers in waiting rooms, posters on post office walls, articles in women's magazines etc was never going to do the job.

It was everywhere across the mainstream media. It was unmissable - even to those of us who were too young to be affected by the changes. Do you really think that none of the major media sources would have pushed this incessantly as a huge story?

If the Tories brought in a sea-change that people would now have to wait years longer for their pensions, the Guardian, Independent and Mirror wouldn't have bothered making anything much of it? If Labour had done it, the Telegraph, Mail, Express and Sun would have just kept quiet?

Even for people who actively choose not to keep themselves abreast of what is going on by reading a paper, watching the TV and radio news and current affairs, keeping their eyes and ears open in general... surely they would have friends, family, associates, colleagues etc. who would have been talking at length about this massive unfolding saga? Other people who were going to be greatly affected - they would just have learned about having to wait years longer for their pension than they'd hoped and would just shrug and not think to mention it to anybody else? And this is even before the days of the internet and smartphones.

Once more for those in the cheap seats - the PHSO made a non binding recommendation which has about as much standing as the opinions expressed in a phone in hosted by Ant and Dec. The response from the government to the PHSO absolutely eviscerated the PHSO recommendation and rightly so because the PHSO recommendation was appallingly flimsy and not supported by the PHSO's own evidence.

All that matters is what the courts think and the High Court ruled in the government's favour.

Even the PHSO concluded that the government had no obligation to notify anyone at all of the changes because personal responsibility is a thing.

So many 'they all knew' messages flying around from all over the place, often from people who admit they themselves were at school at the time. So much sanctimonious smugness.

The parliamentary ombudsman decided procedures were not properly followed at some stage and that compensation is due to some women. Go and argue with the ombudsman.

I have a letter telling me that I would have to wait over almost six years longer than anticipated before I could claim my state pension. I had two years and a few months' notice of this. Please explain to me how I could budget to cover this shortfall.

Around 3 million women were affected in some way by this and some men too, but women (as ever) got hit hardest. Shouldn't it have been worthy of a TV campaign? Putting flyers in waiting rooms, posters on post office walls, articles in women's magazines etc was never going to do the job.

Hats off to you, I don’t know how you do it. By the time I took my state pension and retired I was done.

Really? I was affected and was not told. Do you think that thousands of women are not being truthful then?

I also work for the NHS and am still working at 68.

How could we have known about the 2011 changes which affected us almost immediately and hit much harder than the 1995 changes? Crystal balls?

I'm so fed up of hearing about it. They knew. We all knew. I was at school at the time, a child, with no interest in politics. I knew.

Your money went to pay the pathetically small pensions of your parents and grandparents. I find it very hard to understand how such paltry sums came to be paid to the surviving members of a generation who had lived through two world wars, a flu pandemic and the Great Depression (and who everyone now pretends to have idolised). Surely, with a very small cohort of pensioners and a relatively much larger working-age population (thanks to the post-war baby boom), they could have been treated with more dignity. Sadly, the post-1997 reforms which cut pensioner poverty - like the winter fuel allowance and free bus travel - came too late for many of the Greatest Generation.

It was put towards paying for the pensioners of the day. And the roads and schools and hospitals and military of the day.

There is no pot. It's not "invested". As long as you meet the minimum standards, your pension is the same no matter how much you paid in.

One of the worst decisions was to call it National Insurance. It gives the idea that it's somehow ringfenced or that "your money" is sitting there and you'll get it back.

It's just a tax. It's a targeted tax that's levied on working-age people, but a tax nonetheless. The revenue goes into the general pot to pay for the costs incurred by the government of the day.

Your money was put into the Treasury's bank account and is long since spent.

Your money went immediately straight out again to provide all the benefits funded by taxation. As all your tax does every single year.

The beauty of this system is that it works well when there are steady increases in economic growth, and/or and steady increases in population size, especially if the population gets gradually wealthier over time, so that they can afford to pay generous levels of tax to fund the pensions of those “above” them in the pyramid.

It doesn’t work so well when there is a big demographic bulge of one generation followed by smaller generations with fewer workers.

It particular doesn’t work very well when those younger workers are less well off than they should be, partly because they are struggling to afford housing and families. Then, those younger generations are far less likely (and far less willing) to pay more tax to fund the pensions of a bigger generation above them — and especially a generation who have also disproportionately hoarded all the housing stock and asset wealth of the country so that younger workers are already financially stretched.

(1) It's actually a massive problem for this country that so many things that should be Parliament's prerogative are caught in so much red tape from the legal system. Examples too numerous to count but see: asylum appeals, equal pay for totally different jobs, etc.

(2) I'm constantly told that the "real problem" was the 2011 changes which affected men and women equally so I fail to see how this is "women hating on women". Not a feminist issue sorry.

Except that isn’t how the state pension works, or how it was ever designed to work. This is a massive misunderstanding of how the state pension works.

NICs - yours and your employer’s - is not set aside, nor saved up in any “pot”, nor put into any kind of “investments”. It’s never been so and was never intended to be so. It’s just a form of current taxation.

The state pension is considered a benefit, and has always been paid out from current taxation, not “investments”. Your taxes paid the pensions of the generation above you, and the generations below you pay your pensions from their tax, just the same way any other benefit is paid out from taxation. You didn’t pay for your pension. Future taxpayers will pay it.

If you want a pension that is “invested”, that is a private pension fund. Not the state pension.

Yes it was - into the pensions of the pensioners at the time.

Ffs to you too - there might not be a physical pot but my money was put somewhere .

My MIL is a WASPI woman and does a lot of campaigning for them. She retired at 58 on a private pension having only worked in a low skilled job, still earns over £2.5k per month from her combination of state/private pensions and has £800k in the bank. I struggle to find sympathy for her!

Ffs there is no pot! No one has a pot paid for by their NI contributions. That is not how it works. Your NI contributions paid the pensions of the pensioners at that time. My NI contributions pay today’s pensioners. Not some special pot for me.

As one of these women as you so kindly phrase it I can assure you that we weren’t all told. I worked from 18 and at the time women were paid less than men . ( for the same work ! )
The government are just hoping we will die !
( born in 1955)

No, NHS and universities. They also produced public information leaflets distributed in libraries, doctors' surgeries etc

The WASPI group is campaigning for all women born between 1950 and 1960 and most of them were not affected by bringing forward equalisation to 2018.

If you were 60 in 2010 you were born in 1950, if you were 60 in 2015 you were born in 1955 - it this block they are fighting for

When did you ratify and sign that contract, though?

If governments could set policies and rates/amounts/taxes/benefits that would be binding decades into the future, what would be the point in having elections of different parties to govern every 5 years, if they were just sitting there powerlessly enforcing what the government of two or three generations previous had set in stone?

Even in the space of one year, this current government made firm promises that they've now indicated the need to do a 180 on - and they're far from the first givernment to do so.

Suppose they increase income tax by 2%, can we all just insist that we had a 'contract' to pay the current rate - or indeed any previous rate from decades past that was lower - so nothing will change?

I am a WASPI woman but was able to retire at 61 because we had made contingency plans.
What annoys me is that so many of you think that pension is a ‘benefit’ funded by the taxpayer. It is in fact money that my employer and I paid into the pot for 45 years. The government were charged with investing that money for us so we could receive the pension that WE PAID FOR.

I may have received something in 1995 but as pension seemed a long way off it was not a huge stress. I don’t remember any other letters.

Me too. I remember going into work and talking about it with my colleagues who were also affected . And we weren’t talking about how we could make up our pensions, more “ oh great now we’ve got to work until we’re 66 before we get it” . I don’t actually understand what we are being compensated for - potentially.