Govt considering u-turn on WASPI compensation

I agree with you - fully realising that by 'these types', you clearly aren't referring to all older people in any way.

It just seems so counterintuitive to want your children and grandchildren - not just younger generations in general, but your own family - to struggle more than you did, just so you can maintain the narrative of yourself as the put-upon martyr and them as the spoiled 'don't know that that they're born' lot.

Yes, different generations face different challenges and opportunities - although by no means everybody in that generation - but you have to accept that you live when you live and you have to take it as a package.

My DS is 13 and is already concerned about how he will pay for university. I didn't have any tuition fees to pay at all, and I even got a bit of a grant at one stage. I'm terribly disappointed on his behalf; of course we will do whatever we can to help him, but we aren't lording it over him with tales of how much harder life in general was for us and how much luckier he supposedly is.

In 40 years' time, he will likely be living in great health, prosperity and enjoyment; whereas I will be long dead. I'm genuinely thrilled at the prospect of how great a life he can hopefully have far ahead of him; I'm not making it all about me and bemoaning all the negative things that have befallen me, whilst conveniently glossing over all of the positive things in my own lifetime.

Ha! Waspi campaigners obviously. Stupid autocorrect 😆

The thing is though nobody on here is complaining about people like you. You sound perfectly reasonable and kind. Its the washing campaigners we're talking about. Of which you are not one.

Also mortgage rates were only that high for about six months before coming down again (you can see the spike in the BoE base rate in historic data. It wasn’t for very long!)

Well let’s hope that people like that are in a minority.

Mortgage rate of 10-15% on a mortgage of £40-50k 🤣🤣🤣 (don’t forget housing was super cheap)
Families living on 1 wage and living well, so mum didn’t need to work
Free university
No (or super low) stamp duty

And my experience of 'these type's of greedy envious young people is that they won't see that they, like everyone else, will become better off when they have finished raising children. I don't know anyone who didn't feel hard up in their 30's and 40's. It was just all a bit harder when we had basic rate tax at 33%, mortgage rates at 10 to 15%, and no gullible tax payers chipping in to pay for child care for us.

There is absolutely no point in getting so upset about this. You don't know that anyone will get any compensation, why lash out in this way? It's worryingly strange.
Have you all just found out that your parents are going to leave the million pound house to the cat and dog home?

Good God. You have had awful experiences with the older generation, that's all I can think.
I'm a pensioner. Certainly not rich, but comfortable in that my mortgage is paid ( my house is nowhere near worth a million, we're up north), have private pensions but certainly not 'fat' ones.
I have given my children all the help I can to support them on the property ladder.
I think the WFA should only be paid to those who need it ( the £35k limit is ridiculously high, i know no one who gets that much ). I totally disagree with the Waspi campaign.
I appreciate you are not talking about everyone, but you come over as extremely bitter.

Agree with all of that 👏👏👏

I'm astonished at how proud some people are at their own wilful ignorance. People used to be ashamed of it!

It's actually really arrogant to deliberately ignore all of the normal ways of learning about things and then to be shocked that you don't know the same things that everybody else does.

It's a bit like being amazed that you failed your driving test on the same day as your friend passed hers - simply because she had months of lessons and practice beforehand, whilst you just assumed that it must be obvious and turned up on the day for the first time. After all, the government never told you when you booked your test that you might need lessons first...

I’m in the age group. We knew in plenty of time. I had more than one letter but even if people failed to get a letter it was all over the news and much talked about.

It's a technicality, though. There were so many ways in which a moderately-informed person couldn't have failed to know; yes, they maybe should have technically had more direct communication from the government in order to tick the boxes, but it does women a huge misogynistic disservice and infanticide them to claim that they're unable to understand the world around them and the big issues of the day without being spoon-fed by the government.

I've currently got the TV on and they're talking about the stormy weather warnings; but even if I didn't have the telly on, I can still hear the howling wind outside and I will be standing in it when I go outside soon. If I ignore the media, and ignore the signs that my own senses clearly give me, and then go outside in my undies and get soaked through and shivering with cold as an obvious result, whose fault is that? Who owes me compensation? Can I claim compo from ITV as I wasn't able to watch their channel at the same time as the BBC, so I wasn't enabled to see their weather warnings?

I meant to add that as the waspi women will soon be heavy users of the NHS you would think that would be a bigger priority to them and surely they would want a good standard of education for their grandchildren.

Just to clarify before I answer, I think we were given plenty of notice and the changes were necessary. I find some of the WASPI campaigners greedy and embarrassing. Generally though you aren’t living up to your username at all. The last sentence stereotypes and generalises. The older women you know seem to have had stable marriages and reasonable incomes. You show no understanding of what it was like to be a woman in an unhappy marriage in the 1970s for example or how difficult it was to keep working before maternity leave came in in 1979, and even later when child care was hard to find. There were no in work benefits, income support was paid to the man as head of household, police wouldn’t attend “domestics”. Not every older woman is sitting in a nice paid for home with a big fat pension. Not everyone has inherited money. I know things are generally more difficult now but there are rich and poor in every generation. For poorer women waiting for their pension it was a disappointment. I agree that they aren’t the ones campaigning though.

But fundamentally WHAT DIDFERWNCR WOULD MORE NOTICR HAVE MADE? Either way you had to work longer. Thats it.

I heard a campaigner on LBC last night. She claimed to be angry that she wasn’t informed. She also said that she had seen no publicity and that she hadn’t read a newspaper since the 1970s. Ignorance isn’t an excuse in any other field so why should it be in this case?

i started work in the 1980s and my retirement age was expected to be 60. It’s now 67. That’s life.
One of the two women I know who are affected has been an active voice on this. She feels hard done by. She’s extremely wealthy but is looking forward to a payout. She always knew about the changes but she’s acting like she didn’t, like so many of these women. It’s awful. I’m embarrassed for them.

I won’t get my pension for 7 years later than I thought. It was on the news when the pension age changed. Some people aged 60 -67 are struggling but can’t they claim benefits if they can’t earn enough? Lots of people in the affected cohort (Im a bit too young ) are doing better financially than younger people with dependent children with both parents working and high housing costs. I never understood why there should be ‘compensation’. Means testing would be too expensive, I think it would be fairer to use the existing benefits system for women in this category who are genuinely suffering.

But it isn’t “withdrawing financial support”? It’s a benefit. Any government can change the entitlement to a benefit — as many people found to their cost during the Tory governments of the 2010s.

Child benefit was a universal benefit/entitlement until the Tories decided to change that - and people had almost no notice at all of that change. Lots of entitlements that used to exist have been done away with by successive governments, and people have had to manage accordingly.

I genuinely don't feel ignorance is an excuse. It's not an excuse in any other part of the law/society. i.e. 'I didn't know I wasn't allowed to stab him'; 'Oh, that's all right then, on you go.'
Also, it does scunner me that my mother is 19 years into a lovely retirement on a full pension (she got £11k back paid pension for the few years she was at home, full time child rearing, believe it or not...) I will be lucky if I can retire before I'm 70 😥, and as a single person, I don't have anything/anyone else to fall back on.
Yes, it shouldn't be about someone getting more than someone else, but it does stick in the craw that these women have claimed ignorance meant they are poorer than they thought.

So no one needs to be sympathetic to the idea that it's a disappointment not to retire at 61, they just need to get their heads around the idea that the government really has to make sure that everyone knows when a decision is made to withdraw financial support.

The compensation that the government was advised to pay wasn't because the pension age was raised, but because the women involved were not properly informed.

But my pension age in 1995 was 65 and in 2007 it went up to 68. The fact that the change was accelerated in your case only really results in the same thing: both of us have to work an additional three years to get the state pension. Whether you have a shorter or longer notice period doesn’t really change that, does it? In either case the outcome is the same whether it was an unwelcome surprise or a grim long term forecast. I’m sure in a few years it will rise again, and I fully expect that in reality I may not be able to retire until beyond 70. So don’t you see why younger people aren’t that sympathetic to the idea that it’s a terrible disappointment not to be able to retire at 61…?!

A lot of these points are just not as simple as you claim, or you’re really overstating the case here.

Take education, for example. It’s a widespread but totally false claim about university. The reason is that yes, fewer people went to university in that cohort, BUT an additional 30+ percent had free tertiary education and training in the polytechnics, further education colleges and in workplace training schemes (eg. in nursing, teacher training and so on). These were all free and came with grants. BUT all of these are now university degrees, and the student pays fees to train in them. The actual proportion of the population with tertiary level education is not very much more at all than your generation once you take that into account; and none of you paid any fees for any of it, never mind starting your working life with a mortgage-sized amount of debt.

Equal pay isn’t a new thing. The Equal Pay Act was 1970. The working conditions you describe haven’t been the case since the 1980s at the latest. Yes, it’s taken a long time. Yes, women are still disadvantaged in the workplace compared to men. Yes, some employers still break the law. But paying women less than men for the same work hasn’t been legal since 1970.

Facing some social injustices during a whole working lifetime still doesn’t qualify you for compensation for something completely different. I get a much less good deal on just about everything in life than my parents did. I had no grant, student debt, it was less easy to get a job, houses rocketed in price, the nice defined benefit pension schemes were all closing to new entrants by the time I got there, I missed out on the tax credits, childcare and Sure Start centres of the Blair years which were closed down by the time I had my daughter; she missed out on the Child Trust Fund that children got under Brown which the Tories shut down; my income actually shrank in real terms in the 2000s and 2020s whilst my parents’ generation’s income grew; housing became unaffordable; my pension age rose; etc. etc.

Do I get to demand compensation for all these things? Why not? Because the pensions ages aren’t designed to compensate you for anything. They reflect what the state can afford.