Mixed feelings about WASPI victory

[Fauxflowersnoflowers]

Early 40s here, so this doesn't as such directly affect me, but I've been intrigued by the story about the WASPI campaign and done a bit of reading around it and I'm still confused.

The changes apparently were in the public sphere since as early as 1995 and could have been known about. Many women were aware and did take financial steps to address the changes. The current case seems to centre around whether they should have been personally informed, not was the change fair.

WASPI just said on Women's Hour that they don't object to the equalisation of the pension age, but then callers were objecting to having to work longer and not getting a good retirement, so the two arguments seem to contradiction each other

Also, it seems misunderstood that a compensation payment would be a full reinbursement of the "lost" pension, from my reading it's more likely to be a fixed amount to recognise the fact they should have received a letter. Although again, it appears many did, just not everyone, so who gets the compensation? All of them or just some?

I suppose the other question is how do we pay this? Public services are already stretched badly, childcare costs are crippling and there is a bit of a worry for me that the funds to pay this are going to come out of other areas that will just make the loves of younger women harder and push their pension ages even further back, maybe into their 70s.

Feel really conflicted about it. On one hand kudos to the women for getting this far, but in the other it feels like a really clear example of the importance of properly understanding your own finances and educating yourself about your pension planning.

Some of the posts on here show how divided our society has become. Sweeping generalisations about these women. Sweeping negativity that it’s tough as everyone else is going to have to work longer. Sweeping assumptions that everyone is fortunate enough to have a positive experience of ageing and retirement. Sweeping accusations that lots of these women are now just jumping on the bandwagon and had lots of time to sort out a back up plan. Sweeping statements about gender inequality in terms of men being taken advantage of. It’s depressing!

Many of us also worked in careers that required a great deal of stamina and strength such as teaching special needs children, children with severe behavioural problems, psychiatric nursing etc. Working full time in these jobs at over 60 years of age takes its toll on your health. Also, a lot of our contracts only expected us to work to age 60. Once you reach your sixties, it’s likely your elderly parents need your care or your adult children need help with childcare with childcare costs being so high.

But this will be the case for younger women as well

I bet it gets dragged out so they won't have to pay as many people as they'll be dead

Why should one group of women get compensation for getting the state pension earlier than men and the younger generation? Compensation that will be paid for by the younger generation.

it’s all very well to pretend it’s the “government” somehow denying people something they’re entitled to. But actually what is happening here is the younger generation of taxpayers are paying for a benefit for the older generation of mainly non taxpayers.

If I'd been born 8 hrs earlier I'd have got my SRP 4 months earlier. Those were an expensive 8 hrs. If I'd been born 1year and 1 day earlier (my birthday is on a day where they change the age of pension) I'd have got my pension 3 years and 4 months earlier ie when I was 2 years 4 years younger than I was when I got it. If I'd been born 2years and 1 day earlier I'd have got my pension when I was 3 years and 4 months younger. So yes if she'd been a year older she could easily have got it 2 years earlier.

You can play about with dates on the gov.uk site. It is quite staggering how fast it changed.

there are actually very few women who were genuinely caught out by government incompetence.

And shame on every single one of you begrudging them their compensation. so it comes out of tax? if they had been given their dues - their honest to goodness dues - it would have been paid out anyway.

Well, there's no love lost between the generations, that's for sure. You see it on here all the time - nobody has any obligation to anybody.
@creditdraper I'm not qualified to comment on how easy it is to get a job, the professions open to women etc. Even in 2024 people in their 50's, well qualified find it hard to get jobs due to age discrimination.

However, the stuff you said about 'needing' to help with childcare/ageing parents... there simply isn't that obligation anymore. Sometimes not by choice - people move so far from their homes these days, it's not necessary. However, you will see a lot of posts on here about people being 'entitled' when they ask if GP's should help with childcare. Or just telling people to call Social Services to sort their elderly parents out.

My country of origin has very strong familial relations, I will certainly be moving heaven and earth to help my parents. ILs on the other hand have not lifted a finger. We will certainly be repaying them in kind.

How would it have been paid out anyway? The judgement isn’t about whether or not the pension age should have been changed. It’s about whether the DWP should have communicated the change earlier than it did.

Regardless of whether they won or lost, they weren’t going to get compensation for the change to stare pension age

Your MIL would have had to have been born before 6 April 1950 to retire at 60. That's not correct. To qualify for the state pension on your 60th birthday, you needed to be born on or before 5 May 1950. After that, a lengthy series of steps was used to determine the month and year you were entitled to receive it.

See the link that a pp posted earlier in this thread: State Pension age timetables (publishing.service.gov.uk)

In the post you quote, say the MIL was born on 5 February 1951. She would then have qualified for the pension on 6 November 2011, when she was 60yrs +9 months. But if the DM was born on 6 August 1953, she wouldn't have qualified till 6 November 2017, when she was 64 yrs +3 months.

In other words, someone just two and a half years younger would indeed have got her pension six years later.

This case is about the government being held to account for making sweeping changes which would have a big effect on a group of people whilst making very little effort to actually let those people know what was happening and how it might impact them. Hopefully this ruling stops something like that happening again. I do think any compensation should now be means tested though. I know someone who has homes in this country and abroad and is very wealthy and with the public purse so stretched it’s hard for me to think of her being handed 10k. She is very vocal on it though.

That would probably be because the conditions for an abortion to be allowed were very stringent and rigorously enforced in those days, and you wouldn’t have met them.

Because society was different and the expectations of men and women were considerably different. Many of those WASPI women fought hard for greater freedoms and opportunities that younger women may now take for granted.

Women born in the 1950s were approaching their 40th birthdays before they were able to have their tax separated from their husbands and were probably too old to have children by the time unpaid maternity leave was introduced in 1999.

Everyone got their first mobiles in the late 1990s, and used dial up internet until the mid 2000s. No one had information at their fingertips like they do now. Many women trusted their husbands to look after family finances no matter how naive that might seem.

The ombudsman has found that WASPI women are entitled to compensation. That's on the government and their agencies. Not the women who stood up for themselves. So depressing that younger women do not recognise this.

Same here

I haven’t ever received anything about my pension and although I am in my 60s I haven’t a clue when it is supposed to kick in
I don’t watch tv, listen to the radio or read newspapers.

Most I get is seeing the headlines as I head into a garage to pay for petrol.

It usually is the same topic over and over for months.

I started working (more than) FT at 19.

I'm also a 1950s woman, I don't agree with compensation for the first change, there were years to prepare. I don't really agree with it for women born at the end of the 50s as again they had years to prepare. I do think there are a group of women who had very little time to prepare and for some it won't have made a big difference to them (I'm one of them and I worked till just before my 70th birthday and it didn't actually cause me any hardship) but there are women who struggled with that change and I don't think it is unreasonable to recognise that.

I don't think we have the money for huge compensation figures but I do wonder if they could do something like they do for people who choose to take their pension later i.e. give them an enhancement to their pension ongoing. That might be more affordable and it might appease women who struggled by a small recognition of the problems it caused them.

There’s a lot of folks here that seem to forget that the internet , even old dial up, didn’t come into effect until 1992 in uk (via telephone lines). Wi-Fi came into houses in uk starting around 2001 and even in 2005 uptake was less than 50% of homes. Google universal search , the source of all info to most people was launched in 2007, and social media like Facebook only,kicked off in early 2000s in uk.

martin Lewis, and his MSE source of trusted info was not launched until 2003

so, where were WASPI women supposed to go to get their information on their projected pensions in 1995, or even as late age as 2011 many women would still not be using internet at level and ease of today. Women relied on national newspapers, government broadcasts, and the evidence is the DWP did a shit job of swamping these media channels with the information targeted at those effected. Wonder why that would be?

the Government gateway site to instantly access your pension projection was not launched until 2010, and eve pan now you need photo id to access it. So all ensign information for you individually was done by letter, prior to that at individual level. That wasn’t an issue all the time it was a set age for men and women, it became much more of an issue once government started messing with a ramped up increasing retirement age, and the new state pension, septa etc making * it increasingly more tricky for people to know their pension forecast

so, yep, most women (ones without access to accountants, ones not reading financial pages of newspapers we’re deliberately left in dark about the change. The daily mail (most widely read paper by women back then) were not falling over themselves to publicise as headlines. It’s just the little womin effected, and it’s all in name of equality.

I was born in 1963. Not waspi, but it was bloody hard keeping up with a
l the changes. The majority of my working life I believed I would retire at 60 too. I had time to prepare for the changes. I worked for a big multinational company that gave financial education to their employees so was informed, and we had a great forecast pension that dealt with state pension too including the whole SERP and increased pension age changes.

i feel that whilst the change was “non discriminatory ” to put up age to 65 for women to “match men”, it was and is not “fair” amd it’s certainly not “equalising” pensions for men and women overall. Women’s pension gap still stands at over 36% , men take 75% of the pension tax relief the government gives out for private pension savngs. Women utilise the vast majority of pension credit payments. Women’s pensions were massively effected for WASPI women, and their predecessors by unequal pay (equal pay act only came in 1970s), reduced “stamps” and even the firing of women when married or having a child. Pension annuity rates/draw down incomes for the same savings are/were historically lower due to women living longer, in worse health, than men. It is now estimated that 1 in 10 women are “forced” to retire early due to menopausal symptoms (23% consider it) . And another significant population of women reduce hours and are under employed as they reach 50-60s due to caring roles in higher numbers than men (4 times more likely) . AND Women’s pay gap still exists, and will continue to exists when todays working women and mothers retire.

To pick on the very poorest of pensioners, as women are overall, to claw back government budgets, at a speed that made it impossible for those women to make suitable plans, even supposing they had the luxury of the income pr savings to do so, wasn’t just negligent, it was a deliberate misogynistic and patriarchal tactic- women won’t complain, they’re unlikely to know until it’s too late.

I agree she could have got it two years earlier but generally if someone says something happened years ago you would assume they were talking about more than two years.

Exactly. So many of the current generation will have to pay more years contributions than the WASPI generation. And retire later.

Where’s our compensation?

She is owed it just like anyone else.

If you start down the division route you're doing the government's favoured divide and conquer trick for them.

Really? So males should work longer than females? Where’s the equality in that?

And it was announced in 1995 you’d have to work until at least 65 before you were eligible for state pension so you’ve had plenty of notice in the change in age.

@Sunshinesamba21 I am too young to be in the wasp group and worked full time from 16. I did part time jobs much earlier - about 12/13.

Do you mind me asking how old you are? My mum is a WASPI woman and my dad is the same age. Both have occupational pensions - this was not unusual according to them, both working class, Dad worked in manufacturing and mum for NHS, both left school at 15/16.

@Isitovernow123 Read the thread. You are missing the point.

Womens rights and our standing in society would improve at a much greater rate if we all rowed in the same direction

It would appear, on here, that only works one way....from everyone else to younger, presumably millennial and below women.

I agree with a pp that it would appear that young women today dont grasp how this older, waspi, generation of women were responsible for the rights that we have as women today in the workplace.

And this is the generation raising the future taxpayers. Let's hope that karma will bite them in the backside when their own daughters and granddaughters dismiss their struggles and think of them as entitled and spoilt.

No it’s not, read the ops post. They weren’t born 1950s