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.

Alsohuman- it’s also a simple fact that lines have to be drawn somewhere, and the nearer you are to that line, the harder it feels. But it doesn’t make it unfair.

FWIW if my 3rd child had been born a little bit later, we’d have been entitled to free nursery hours which would have saved us literally thousands of pounds. It doesn’t mean the system is unfair though, and that I should be entitled to compensation.

No one has been shat on. As has been pointed out many times, the state pension like any govt funding can be altered at any time, in terms of value and qualifying date. It has been known for literally years that this would happen, and I fully expect further squeezes on it in future.

Yes it would be wonderful if I could stop paying several hundred pounds a month NI on the basis that I’m fully paid up now. Just as it would have been lovely to receive a cheque for several tens of thousands of pounds to cover the childcare that we had to pay in full from when our eldest child was 12 weeks old to when our youngest started school. After all, people just the other side of the line had a year off on maternity leave before having to pay childcare - and then got free hours from age 3!

It doesn’t work like that though, and quite rightly the courts recognised this in the pensions case.

@Iamthewombat

Because as a low income self employed person I can stop paying when I have enough years to qualify for a state pension. I’m not paying 40 or 45 years’ worth of contributions, just the 35 I need.

OK, @Alsohuman - let's give those 300,000 women what's fair, let's put them all back to 60. It'll cost £215 billion, funded by working people (including women!), many of whom are currently being eaten alive by rents/childcare costs/student loans/cost of living rises/low pay. But that's all fine and dandy, if it means that 300,000 women get their entitlement to have the law stay the same at all times.

Have you read the court judgment? It said that: (a) the information given was sufficient and reasonable; (b) nobody is entitled to have the law remain the same forever; (c) the Government is entitled to make policy decisions based on facts; (d) the Government's decision in 2011 was reasonable given the need to take into account inter-generational fairness i.e. the fact that you're asking younger people who are generally poorer to pay more to ensure that a subgroup of women can get their state pension much earlier then they will.

I do sympathise with the situation but fairness cuts both ways. This is an extremely expensive remedy you're seeking, and it's not you paying for it.

Transition adjustments will always be unjust to somebody. That’s how life is. Should the young people who had to start paying university tuition fees of £9k be screaming about the blatant injustice of their date of birth placing them on the wrong side of the line, where fees were lower for the school year above them?

Arguably they have much more right to do so than the Back to 60 campaigners who were put in the same position as everybody else their age a bit sooner than they had hoped.

Would you be supportive of a line if you were on the right side of it?

Or do you think that no state benefits should ever be adjusted so that nobody is ever on the wrong side of the line? No ‘blatant injustice’ to upset selfish WASPIs, but the country would be bankrupt. Check out the blatant injustice then, eh? When hospitals can’t do operations because paying pensions to people who feel like retiring at 60 has used up all the cash.

@Frannyhy, seriously?

@Alsohuman
Indeed I did plan. My plan was to carry on working as long as possible. I never assumed I'd receive the SP at 60 because that was blown out of the water in 1995. I also realised that I'd be better off working than being on a pension. To that end, I re-trained at 50 and became, for the most part self employed, and added another source of income at 55+ by creating what is called a portfolio career.

This idea that anyone does one job for life and never looks beyond that if their circumstances change, or the benefits system changes, is quite depressing.

And as for paying into the pot, through NI, (which doesn't just go to pensions) I pay a % of my self-employed income deducted each year as part of my tax return.

Your argument doesn't stack up which is why they lost the case.

@Alsohuman I'd also like you to answer the questions about men's pensions being raised to 66 (when they have a lower life expectancy than women) and the fact they would also have a case to have their pensions backdated to 60.

I’m not seeking any remedy. I’ve already said I think the 1995 changes were fair. I’ve already said equalising pension ages is fair. What I think is unfair is the way it’s been implemented, much like the blatant unfairness of the child benefit cut off.

When you address the points raised in a post, I won’t use the term “hard of reading”

People in glass houses @Alsohuman

What about men and their rights if this case had been won by women?

@Alsohuman

Yes it’s true for low income SE people.

@Alsohuman But as another poster says there are many other examples of unfairness. The plight (?) of women having to work a bit longer is nothing compared to students who paid £3K a year for uni fees not that long ago and others paying £9K a year now.

In the grand scheme of things when the country had little spare cash, where is your moral compass?

I doubt these women are living in dire straits.
I have nothing but contempt for them if they are grasping at the chance of getting a lump sum when people are dying from lack of drugs for cancer ( too expensive) and operations.

How can there be anything fair about that? It's greed.

My mother falls into this category and to be honest I think she is quite grabby. She's never worked outside the home but is furious that she isn't getting what she feels she's entitled to having 'paid in all her life'. Her motivator is that if she gets her state pension rather than benefits then she'll be exempt from bedroom tax, which is high because she lives on her own in a 4 bed council house.

What would you think was a fair implementation? I already know the answer. One that meant that you personally didn’t suffer any disadvantage.

Face it: as other posters have repeatedly noted (and as the judgment stated), the government is within its rights to change implementation plans.

So you were told in 2011 - eight years ago - that you’d have to wait a maximum of another 2 years compared to what you’d previously thought. So what? My SPA is 68. I’m not banking on it. If, when I am 65, the government raises it from 68 to 70, then I’ll work for longer if I need to. I won’t be whining about ‘blatant injustice’ or ‘double whammies’.

If she has never worked she will not get the full SP. You can get credits for years as a full time parent, but that is unlikely to add up to 35 years needed.

It’s not unfair though alsohuman- it’s the fact that you’re the ‘wrong’ side of the line which makes you feel hard done by. Just like I could whinge and whine about our 3rd child being a few months too old for free nursery hours. Or like the first cohort of tuition fee paying students could whine about it being ‘unfair.’ The fact is, the courts confirmed that it wasn’t unfair.

Incidentally I wonder how many of the waspi women ever campaigned decades ago against the injustice to men of having a higher pensionable age than women? That was the original unfairness, and was blatantly inequitable, which needed to be righted

In the grand scheme of things, the current government has suddenly found a magic money forest, including £100 million for a Brexit campaign so the economic argument doesn’t really wash.

I’d be happy with an admission of having screwed up and an apology. Even Baroness Altman, a former pensions minister, says it’s unjust and has been bungled.

@Alsohuman, tell us what you would have done if you were in charge of the treasury in 2011. Where would you have cut the £215 Bn from in order to enable 300,000 women to retire at 62 or 63 instead of 64/65?

And please don’t say ‘tax the rich’. Deluded people who claim that there is no need for austerity always think, yeah, Roman Abramovitch probably earns a billion quid a year, yeah, let’s tax him at 90%, that will definitely happen, problem solved, no more austerity. QED.

Don’t you see that £100m wouldn’t even touch the sides?

If she has never worked she will not get the full SP. You can get credits for years as a full time parent, but that is unlikely to add up to 35 years needed.

If she had a big age gap between oldest and youngest child, plus a few years claiming unemployment benefit, plus maybe a few later years claiming carers credit and you can easily hit the 35 years of "credits" without ever working.

Incidentally I wonder how many of the waspi women ever campaigned decades ago against the injustice to men of having a higher pensionable age than women?

We were too busy campaigning for decent maternity leave and pay, equal pay, widely available childcare and the other support We didn’t have that younger women take for granted. If the patriarchy had been concerned about their pensions, they were more than capable of doing their own campaigning.

Ok, typical age for a waspi woman, born 1953. She would have been 58 when the 2011 ruling came in. Even for someone working in a minimum wage job, they would be better off (quite rightly) continuing in work than on a state pension. I can’t see how these women are complaining unless of course they had already stopped working (like Ilovemypantry from earlier in the thread) or they were only working part time. And quite frankly anyone not working or working only part time in their late 50s is in an already privileged position (not counting, of course, anyone so disabled they cannot work, which is irrelevant in the context of this thread)

@Iamthewombat, you’ve ignored my second para - again.

@ImNotYourGranny I've posted already on the thread but my mum is campaigning for it, despite having 2 generous occ pens (hers and my dad's) and an £800k profit from selling their house. They both retired at 55 and live on the interest from the house sale, she worked mostly part time during her life, and yet she's still outraged that she can't have her SP at 60. I know this isn't every woman but it makes it very hard to have much sympathy for all of this.

I can't just change jobs as for one I have very young children to think about and I can only work nightshifts as I have no childcare during the day. So I am usually up 24 hours + before I get to my bed. Also I work In a private nursing home and only have a nhs pension that I paid into for 10 Years
It's not easy if you've worked as a nurse for over 20 Years to just get another job , my friend tried to change jobs and she got told she was over qualified

@Alsohuman - despite repeatedly having it explained that it's the lack of time to make changes/save for the new retirement that was the issue, jingling and others continue with their wrong claims.
I suspect they have comfortably off retired DPs or DPILs who are enjoying the proverbial world cruises and this is the reason they are so peeved and thus determined to prove that waspis are scrounges and they the younger generation have it hard. It is pointless explaining it again.