AIBU to think that WASPI women should not be entitled to compensation?

[mugglewump]

They've been on the news again marching for compensation in a climate where the government is having to make very difficult decisions about funding to stop our debt ever increasing.

I think there are far more deserving cases for goverment money than women who didn't act on information at the time and sort their pensions out or keep working (p/t or f/t) until retirement age.

Moreover, the people paying this compensation are those who will be working until they are 67 to 70 to claim a state pension. Surely, it's a bit ick to expect them to bail out women who retired at 60?

It would be paid for by mostly younger workers who'll not get the state pension at such an early age as the most affected waspi women.

The waspi women paid the pensions of the people who came before them and who retired earlier, so I wouldn't expect them to find this a convincing argument. On the face of it they have a reasonable expectation that subsequent generations will do the same for them. There may be good reasons not to compensate them but this isn't one of them.

because they should have have taken personal responsibility for checking their own pensions and because it was so widely advertised that most people were aware.

It wasn' that straightforward. One of the driving factors in moving away from the old pension scheme was its complexity. In many cases it was virtually impossible to calculate your entitlement unless you were a pension specialist. A side effect of this was that the reporting at the time oversimplified the changes, because to have done otherwise would have made the reports incomprehensible to the general public. To get a reliable forecast you had to either have a very simple history (which the waspi women generally didn't have because of the changes imposed on them) or to ask the government to send you one, which sometimes took a very long time.

To give you an example, I reached retirement age a year before the new state pension was introduced. The papers were full of 'anyone retiring after xxx will get the new pension'. I wanted to know whether I would qualify for the new pension if I deferred retiring for a year. Despite extensive research I couldn't get a definitive answer until in exasperation I wrote to my MP. He referred it to the pensions minister. The answer was no. If I had relied on the extensive publicity and newspaper reports, as people are saying the waspi women should have done, I would gave been totally misled.

There seems to be quite a few people unhappy that the WASPIs haven’t shuffled off their mortal coils yet!

They are not people who were not informed.

They are people who didn't want to know & in many cases buried their heads in the sand.

They also include women who in many cases hadn't worked much at all, and this is why they are outraged that the solution was to continue working to fund the wait for state pension. They did not want to work.

I agree.
I am a WASPI and knew about this decades ago.
It disgusts me these women are making out they were not told.
It was first announced as a plan in 1995 when we/ they were 40-ish.

The whole thing is a scam and the women are not accepting their own ignorance and lack of engagement with the facts. It was all over the media, they could access their own state pension forecasts well in advance, but they didn't bother.

The Ombudsman took a long time looking into the complex ins and outs of this, and found that there was significant wrong doing, and the WASPI women were due compensation. Before the election the Labour Party publicly promised to support the women, then refused to as soon as they got into power.

The ombudsman found that between 1995 and 2004 information about the change was widespread and that the government had done as much as was possible to provide information.

If your Mum is 71 now she reached state pension age at 66.

She’s not 71 yet - used it for ease in my post. She was definitely 67 when she got her pension & continues to work weekends to support herself.

I think you are mistaken. I'm 67 and claimed mine when I was 66.

@TwentyKittens
"The ombudsman found that between 1995 and 2004 information about the change was widespread and that the government had done as much as was possible to provide information."
But it was the change in 2011, that 'sped up' the change with only 5 years notice.
Yes, it affected me, but I was notified (5 years notice, I would have to work longer, which MPs considered too little time for themselves).
I also asked several times for a pension forcast. Which is often a waste of time, as the rules kept changing.
So, I think morally the women are right, but as the country is totally bankrupt, there's not a hope in getting any compensation, anyway. So as one of those affected, I have not joined in with any campaign.