AIBU in thinking the government have made the correct decision not to blanket pay all WASPI women £3k? This goes against the Ombudsman recommendations to pay between £1k-3k to every WASPI women.

[caringcarer]

At the time it was in every newspaper for weeks, in the radio and on the TV news a lot of coverage via the media. Most women of this age agree they knew about pension age changes. At the time it was huge. I fail to understand how any women could not have known unless they lived off grid. No individual letters were sent out to the women who would be affected. The Ombudsman's recommendation was that a blanket payment of between £1k-3k be paid to all WASPI women. Labour have just announced no money will be paid out at all. It would have cost the taxpayer up to £10.5 billion pounds on top of the huge amount of my ney it has cost to review it for several years. It is money that the government just don't have. Assuming lessons have been learned and any future changes will see DWP send out letters to any individuals who it will directly affect. The only worry is that it sets a precedent of ignoring what the Ombudsman's recommendations.

Yeah maybe. I get the impression though that many younger women seem resentful of my generation.

What pensioners often don't seem to realise is that they haven't paid into a magic state pot that pays out for them later, their state pensions are being paid for by the current workforce, like other state benefits.

What younger people often don't seem to realise is that pensioners have already paid the state pensions of those who were pensioners while they themselves were working. Some don't understand an automatic assumption that they'd be willing to pay both for the people before them, and for themselves.

There's fewer workers supporting far more pensioners than ever before. You might have been equally as "unwilling" had the same demands been placed on your generation.

Unfortunately, in previous generations this model was sustainable. There were more workers, and less pensioners. That model doesn't work today, and hasn't for some time. In actuality, that model should have been revised way before 1995. Waspi women will still benefit from many years of extra pension compared to those that follow them.

This. ^ Comparing it to the tragic blood scandal and other seriously bad things that happened is an utter disgrace. And PMSL at the posters claiming they have lost £50,000. What a load of crap. You have lost NOTHING. You are just having to work til 65/66 now like the men have always to (instead of 60.) And like women born after 1960 were told they had to, many years ago!

Women are often in much cushier/less physical jobs than men, and many have had quite a few years at home (not in paid work at all) even when the children were teenagers and older - and they didn't NEED to be at home. SOME women (not all!) have had a very cushy life, not having to work, or working part time in cushy jobs.

So you have to work til 65/66 now, get over it. Things change, and younger people who are struggling to buy a home, and make ends meet, and pay astronomical tuition fees, do NOT want to be funding your early retirement - (at 60!) IME the women complaining about all this are the ones who have had the cushiest lives.

I was told I had to work til 66 when I was in my early 30s, because I was born after 1960 (the mid 1960s,) and the women who were born before 1960 (who were told THEN that they can retire at 60,) laughed at me, and mocked me. I sucked it up though, and just got on with it. As I said, I can't muster up a shred of empathy for these women who were told a few years later that they must now work til 65/66.

As for the ones saying they didn't know about it. Nope. Not buying it. It was MASSIVELY covered in the news and media at the time. Newspapers, TV, radio, magazines, everywhere... And anyone in any workplace got to know about it. I don't believe anyone who says they didn't know.

Despite there being 'no internet and no smartphones,' I bet these posters claiming they didn't know about the change in retirement age for women, knew all about The Falklands War, The Herald Of Free Enterprise, Hillsborough, The Gulf War, Charles and Diana getting married, Kennedy getting assassinated, Thatcher selling off all the council houses (and the post office, British Gas, and the trains etc,) Live Aid, who was No 1 in the charts every week, AIDS, and the deaths of John Lennon, Elvis, and Marylin Monroe. (Amongst many MANY other stories and events!) Also I bet they can name every Prime Minister since they were born, and probably most of the Presidents of the USA. Yet the news about the retirement age being raised for women somehow passed them by! Pull the other one. It's got bells on!

90% knew about this change in age and we voted in the Tories many times in recent years.

So if anyone is thinking "entitled boomers" its the Tories who initially gave us this increase in pension ages, later changes affect men too, who also tend to die earlier, so should retire a little earlier than us lot.

20 years ago Gordon Brown identified the oap’s as being the most deprived in our society thus the reason for introducing the winter fuel payment.

Since when the state pension has increased by 40% in real terms. An increase dwarfing the value of the WFP, such that the circumstances surrounding its introduction no longer apply.

Do you think basic pension £11,500 is high though?

Age U.K. still say 2.5m in hardship due to the cut

The situation is very different now. When the state pension was introduced there were 20 people of working age to every pensioner, now there are fewer than 3 people of working age to every pensioner. This will be a combination of people living longer meaning more pensioners, plus falling birth rate meaning fewer working people.

Unfortunately, an individual having paid taxes for others to have a pension doesn't mean anything for what they'll get as a pensioner.

Don’t worry all of you 30+ jummy mummy’s what goes around comes around. By the time that you retire there will be no state pension and you’ll be working till you drop

More than aware of that @Kingoftheroad . Younger generations have been absolutely screwed over, I was listening to an economist yesterday who said that those born each decade since the 1950s have been poorer than those born in the decade before them. Those born in the 2000s can probably forget home ownership completely.

But I'm not stupid or complacent, I've seen the way things are going and am planning ahead. Small house in a cheap area, overpay the mortgage to reduce the interest I'll pay. No getting into debt to run a car, live within my means etc. Importantly I'm maxing out my AVCs, so that my workplace pension will provide for me when I can no longer work (and I've set my target retirement age at 70).

Women currently in their 60s, especially later 60s and above were routinely discriminated against in the workplace, sacked for being pregnant or even on marriage, blocked from educational opportunities and barred from workplace pension schemes. It entirely to be expected that women who then find themselves single in older age will struggle when all they have is the state pension (if that) and its one of the lowest in Europe.

What utter rubbish.
I'm not claiming no-one ever was sacked, as there are bad employers now and throughout history, but to say people were "routinely sacked" is cobblers.
Yes, I am in my 60s. Yes, I was at work in the 80s.
Yes, everyone was aware pension age was raised - discussed in staffrooms, in pubs, in baby groups, and anywhere people meet each other and chat, even if you somehow never read a paper, listened to the radio or watched the news on the TV.

That isn’t true. I and most of my friends had our children in the 1970s when there were no maternity rights. You keep being told this but still persist in your fiction.

I get the impression though that many younger women seem resentful of my generation

Speaking as a millennial our generation has seen broken promise after broken promise. Tuition fees treble overnight, interest rates go up just as people have racked up giant student loans and/or mortgages, Brexit etc. With climate change and a rapidly declining birthrate many of us have a pretty bleak outlook for what our retirement might look like. I think younger woman are being pretty sanguine about all this to be honest.

i spent most of my first, planned, pregnancy either in court or at my lawyer's office. It was absolutely shit. And in a country where it is so super illegal to fire a pregnant woman, when i went to register as unemployed they denied my claim because i must be lying about it. My lawyer actually came with me to the challenge on that because he couldn't believe how stupid some people are.

Back to WASPI. When this first started, and because i haven't totally kept up i assumed it was still the case, the DWP could actually identify something like 100,000 women who were absolutely shafted by this. And at the time it was first being discussed the sums involved weren't really huge. And those women absolutely deserve to be compensated and the fact that they can be identified (some living in utter poverty due to life circumstances, some have since died) makes it all the more outrageous that these women are not being compensated for their losses.

All the others, meh. Not so much. When i entered the workforce at 18 i was supposed to have a retirement age of 60. Which went up to 63 then 65. It's now 67. Yippee.

I am not surprised at some of the, frankly, vile ageism on here.

YOu are so wrong OP

@Brefugee I’m intrigued by the 100k people they identified. What was specific to that group to single them out? I don’t know enough about the report to understand.

Their date of birth. It was 300k, not 100.

You had your children young then. I am in my late 50s and I was working in the mid/late 1980s when women your age were pregnant and they were not getting sacked for it. In the company I worked for they were paid too.

But what specifically singled them out by DOB?

AFAIK it was a cohort who were born between two dates, and i think these are the ones who had the extra 2 years added on where the letters were 28 months too late.

But as i said, i read about it when it first happened then didn't really follow it because it seemed obvious to me that they knew they had diddled them out of pension, they knew how much it was, and they knew who they were. Seemed like a no-brainer to me.

Then you were very privileged if your company gave maternity pay above the statutory few weeks (which was reclaimed from government) and were not getting rid of women whilst pregnant.

I'm similar era and absolutely did see women "managed out" and constructively dismissed whilst pregnant and my peers were all routinely asked about family plans when interviewing for jobs.

Its happening now, it was mainstream back then.

how many times do we have to say it. Just because it wasn't YOUR experience, it was for a lot.

For example: every woman who ever joined the forces until about 1995, who got pregnant. Was out before 12 weeks, or immediately if they were further along. Thus not even qualifying for SMP.

I'm mid 50s and in 80s and early 90s pregnant women were, if not routinely sacked, managed out, or demoted. I was one of them. The hositily was awful.
I remember a meeting about pensions i was not invited to, because 'I probably wouldn't come back after the baby'

I agree though, that unless you spent at least 15 years or so not working, not listening to the news, or reading the newspapers than there is no way these women could have missed the raise in pension age.

Regardless of communication, state pension ages should not be changed for adults already working. It's morally wrong and leaves them with reduced time in which to make up the shortfall.

Once you start working and start paying NI it should be seen as a committed contract. You pay in for a minimum of x years over your lifetime and get y when you are z years old. People should be able to rely on it or they should be able to opt out of paying into it at all. (Put health costs into income tax and make NI voluntary.) You cannot force people to pay in to a scheme without also giving them the security of knowing what they will get out of it.

If state pension ages need changing then it needs doing for people who are not yet working - and needs to come with corresponding consideration for how to ensure they still have a fair shot at saving for a private pension.