To think the back to 60 campaign is grabby

[Neaoll]

It's been known about for a long time that state pension ages would be equalised.

State pension is just unsustainable, it was never supposed to be something people claim for 20-30 years. Was for people that had a hard time so they didn't starve to death in their last few years. Now it's a top-up to the richest part of society. It should have been linked with life expectancy a long time ago.

I'm in my 40s and dont expect to ever get a state pension. I've been contributing to my private pension ever since I worked to support myself.

I think Back to 60 sounds unrealistic. (not grabby) but I do think the women affected by the acceleration should be reimbursed the difference from the original increase and the second one.

Ridiculous. There was no state funded childcare then. Young people cannot seem to grasp that things were different then.

hmm hate to break it to you Fatshedra but there was - every child got 15 hrs free from their 3rd birthday, same as it was till a couple of years ago.

The 15hrs free childcare was introduced in 1996. I had my children before then, and never had free childcare, paid in full for every single hour.

The WASPI women didn't have 20 years to get used to the pension age change - they had notice of the first change, but it was the Cameron government who accelerated the pace of change, in 2011.

zsazsa You have exactly the same attitudes to social housing tenants as you do to WASPI women so dont use social housing as a stick to beat them with.

I worked for a local authority when I left school in 1971 and it was compulsory to join the pension scheme.

No, it wasn’t. I started work for a local authority in 1987 and it was optional.

My gripe isn’t about the equalisation of pension age but the way the transition was done, with the impact falling on a cohort of 300, 000 women born in the space of two or three years. I sucked up the 1995 change because it was only a couple of years and I was young enough to plan. That wasn’t the case with the 2011 change. Added to that, the transition is grossly unfair - if I’d been born 7 hours earlier, I’d have got my pension three months sooner.

@Alsohuman I guess it depended on your local authority then - my mum says all 3 of us got 5 free half days from age 3 (Stockport), eldest born 1982.

When I started paying into my pension I was told I could retire at 60, now it’s 67 and instead of my contributions decreasing as a pay off, they’ve gone up. There is no way that would be tolerated in the private sector.

Plus, the 15 hours are not free. they are in most cases subsidised, so you need to pay a top up - if you can get them at all. and its term time only. all in all a fairly minimal help for working women

There wasn't universal free childcare in 1996. My children were born in 97 and 99. I think we had it for the younger one when she was 4, but we had nothing for the older one (summer born, so was at school soon after her 4th birthday).

I don't think free childcare was universal for 3 year olds until 2005.

@vivienscott - If your contributions are being moved up while your retirement age is increased I can only assume you have a public sector final salary pensions. That wouldn’t be tolerated in the private sector now as they are so expensive (due to increased life expectancy) that they are utterly unaffordable and have invariably been closed.

Private sector final salary pensions are almost unheard of now. You almost only get back what you pay in and the investment risk is all yours.

You’ve got a great deal compared to most- at the taxpayers expense. That may or may not be fair but is not something to grip about.

@pleasebeafleabite - you do realise 1996 was 23 years ago?

Mine were born from 1996 and got free nursery from age 3. It was either 'vouchers' towards private providers or council run 5 half days a week.

How much do some of you pay your child minders Enough so they dont have to claim tax credits/UC and can afford to pay into a private pension.

Free child care was introduced in 2010 apparently.

There is no way that would be tolerated in the private sector.

Some private sector pensioners got a far worse deal, such as those who invested in Equitable Life, and several other high profile firm collapses.

I had all my pensions in Equitable Life and lost tens of thousands of pounds from my fund which had a dramatic effect on future pensions.

@zsazsajuju
If your contributions are being moved up while your retirement age is increased I can only assume you have a public sector final salary pensions. That wouldn’t be tolerated in the private sector now as they are so expensive (due to increased life expectancy) that they are utterly unaffordable and have invariably been closed.

I think @VivienScott was simply referring to the same sort of situation that most of us are in where the age at which I can collect my occupational pension has increased and, at the same time, my pension contribution rates have increased by several percentage points. Yes, when I joined, it was a final salary scheme but it isn't now.

you do realise 1996 was 23 years ago?

No I did not realise that. Thank you so much for informing me of that fact.

No, really. Thanks

What I don’t get (and I expect the pro-back to 60 campaigners to jump in and tell me that I lack intelligence, can’t wait) is this:

Why would somebody aged 62 now be in penury solely as a consequence of the second change to her pension age in 2011?

If you were short of money already, having to wait a few extra years for your pension isn’t going to make you poor. You were poor already before the change. Assuming that you are not too ill to work - which is what disability benefit is for, not the state pension - why would you not just carry on working?

I worked with a woman who point blank refused to believe that her pension age would be moved back from 63, when the 2011 changes were announced. She preferred to stick her fingers in her ears and effectively say ‘la la la I’m not listening’. How many of the back to 60 campaigners did the same thing?

As for the supposed unfairness of the 2011 change: imagine that you’re the treasury, a couple of years out from the financial crisis. You have to make hard choices. What’s easier to sell: accelerating equalising the retirement age or cutting funding for schools and the NHS? If you didn’t have a vested interest, can you truthfully say that you wouldn’t have done the same? Of course, the treasury could have ignored the fact that pensions were unaffordable and kept borrowing to keep everybody happy. Let’s ask the Greeks how well that worked out for them.

Face it: sometimes life is unfair. I paid a shitload in SERPS and S2P before they were got rid of, which under the old system would have bought me a bigger state pension. Will I get any benefit from them in the future? Will I fuck, but c’est la vie. Similarly I have a preserved civil service pension from when I still worked in the public sector. It will pay a healthy annual amount from my state pension date, which I bet will be 70 by the time I get it (I’m 48). So I have to wait a long time for it, but again, c’est la vie. I’ll keep on working and stashing as much as I can afford in a SIPP. As previous posters have noted, you play the cards you are dealt.

I don’t think that complaining about your retirement age ‘suddenly’ being moved up by 7 years helps your cause: the only semi-sudden change came in 2011. Nor does moaning that you were told, at the beginning of your working life, that you could retire at 60 win much sympathy from me. Things change. Deal with it.

As for those arguing that the women in the WASPI cohort were ordered to stay at home with the kids and not follow proper careers: bollocks. If you were born in 1953, you would’ve been 29 in 1982. The year Next launched, filling a need for clothes for the legions of women entering the workplace in professional roles. The start of a decade notable for aspiration to succeed, when financial services and IT were expanding massively. Whilst not everyone can go into white collar roles, many women could and did. Don’t let’s pretend it was a time when it was normal for women to be housewives in the 1980s. It absolutely wasn’t.

Why would somebody aged 62 now be in penury solely as a consequence of the second change to her pension age in 2011

Irrelevant, it's about the sneakiness of the government, the lack of information.

As for those arguing that the women in the WASPI cohort were ordered to stay at home with the kids and not follow proper careers: bollocks

No-one has said this.

Just for you Jingling.

Kevin Bridges on working for self esteem.

Very funny, and spot on about the so-called dignity of labour :o

I always remember this one: work sucks, that's why they pay you do it.

"It makes zero sense to stop work at 60 or any age"

Oh gosh yes Jingling You are so right. Both you and Glasgow bin lorry man who thought the same thing.

My mum retired at Christmas 2015 two months before her 80th birthday after 50 years work in factories. She absolutely lived for self esteem Friday. She now has all the health problems that go with 50 years manual work.

My dad retired from his taxi job just over a month ago at the

age of 83 after 27 years Before that he was in construction from the 1950s to the early 90s as a site foreman. You cant do all jobs till you drop you know.

My mum was born in Italy in the 1930s and worked since she was 8 years old.

My parents more than deserve their retirement.

zsazsajuju Sat 05-Oct-19 10:20:18
There’s also no reason people in their early 60s cannot work because of their age alone. If they are disabled they should be entitled to disability benefits on the same basis as everyone else. It’s also pretty hypocritical to say that women should get benefits at an earlier age than men when men often have more physical jobs

lol

Men claimed pension credit at 60 but with raising of the SPA for women, men have to soldier on too if in ill health. Pension Credit was paid to men at 60 because it was set at the same age as the state pension age for women.

Your"re welcome

6 April 2010 - women's state pension age begins to rise
The first women are affected by the equalisation changes. Women born 6 April 1950 to 5 May 1950 have to wait until 6 May 2010 to reach state pension age, a delay of up to one month.

Entitlement to Pension Credit for MEN and women is now linked to women's state pension age rather than the age of 60. A similar change restricts entitlement in England only to free bus travel. Entitlement to Winter Fuel Payment is also linked to women's state pension age and the qualifying date for the payment in winter 2010/11 moves to 5 July 2010. It will rise by six months each year.

So you see low income men WERE receiving a benefit at 60 the SAME time as women until the SPA for women was raised. This also raised the Pension Credit age. In your post of 10.20 on the 5th zsazsa you mentioned benefits So you wernt referring to the State Pension specifically. Therefore me mentioning PC is relevant

Have we been reading the same thread, Echt? You say that nobody has claimed that women were expected to be SAHMs and hence were prevented from building up a pension of their own.

I’ve read numerous posts on this thread claiming that women in this cohort were disadvantaged by being prevented from taking up well-paid pensionable careers because of social conditioning and/or the expectations of people around them that they would become SAHMs or do little jobs, like being a dinner lady, to fit in around children.

Whilst I get that careers have often been more difficult for women, I simply don’t believe that women who were 29 in 1982 (a) would have absorbed this message; if they were born in 1932 I might have some sympathy with that view and (b) could have failed to notice in the 1980s that hundreds of thousands of women just like them were going to work, including those with children.

So to argue that they had no chance of building up entitlement to an occupational pension is incorrect. They did. Yes, some schemes excluded part timers, but a woman in full time work at that time could absolutely have joined an occupational pension scheme.

There are many reasons why women of the WASPI generation may not have a pension of their own to fall back on, but “I was expected to be a SAHM and no examples or role models of working women existed during my prime working years” isn’t one of them.