WASPI Women - getting compensated

[CanSeeClearlyNowTheRainHasGone]

I've just read this:

The government will reconsider its decision not to award compensation to Waspi women, Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden has said.

And I'm livid at the incompetence of Labour.

Having put the issue to bed once, they are now going to create a heap of trouble for themselves.

Either they decide (again) not to make any payouts - in which case, cue more outrage from WASPI and negative headlines.

Or they decide now that they will make payouts - which goes directly against the whole "we have to raise taxes" budget.

Or are they really so stupid that they're going to carry on paying everyone, raising salaries for Public Sector, 2-child cap, WFP, etc and carry on bleating about a black hole and how we must all pay more tax.

Am I being unreasonable that this seems like madness?

Except that isn’t how the state pension works, or how it was ever designed to work. This is a massive misunderstanding of how the state pension works.

NICs - yours and your employer’s - is not set aside, nor saved up in any “pot”, nor put into any kind of “investments”. It’s never been so and was never intended to be so. It’s just a form of current taxation.

The state pension is considered a benefit, and has always been paid out from current taxation, not “investments”. Your taxes paid the pensions of the generation above you, and the generations below you pay your pensions from their tax, just the same way any other benefit is paid out from taxation. You didn’t pay for your pension. Future taxpayers will pay it.

If you want a pension that is “invested”, that is a private pension fund. Not the state pension.

(1) It's actually a massive problem for this country that so many things that should be Parliament's prerogative are caught in so much red tape from the legal system. Examples too numerous to count but see: asylum appeals, equal pay for totally different jobs, etc.

(2) I'm constantly told that the "real problem" was the 2011 changes which affected men and women equally so I fail to see how this is "women hating on women". Not a feminist issue sorry.

Your money went immediately straight out again to provide all the benefits funded by taxation. As all your tax does every single year.

The beauty of this system is that it works well when there are steady increases in economic growth, and/or and steady increases in population size, especially if the population gets gradually wealthier over time, so that they can afford to pay generous levels of tax to fund the pensions of those “above” them in the pyramid.

It doesn’t work so well when there is a big demographic bulge of one generation followed by smaller generations with fewer workers.

It particular doesn’t work very well when those younger workers are less well off than they should be, partly because they are struggling to afford housing and families. Then, those younger generations are far less likely (and far less willing) to pay more tax to fund the pensions of a bigger generation above them — and especially a generation who have also disproportionately hoarded all the housing stock and asset wealth of the country so that younger workers are already financially stretched.

It was put towards paying for the pensioners of the day. And the roads and schools and hospitals and military of the day.

There is no pot. It's not "invested". As long as you meet the minimum standards, your pension is the same no matter how much you paid in.

One of the worst decisions was to call it National Insurance. It gives the idea that it's somehow ringfenced or that "your money" is sitting there and you'll get it back.

It's just a tax. It's a targeted tax that's levied on working-age people, but a tax nonetheless. The revenue goes into the general pot to pay for the costs incurred by the government of the day.

Your money was put into the Treasury's bank account and is long since spent.

Your money went to pay the pathetically small pensions of your parents and grandparents. I find it very hard to understand how such paltry sums came to be paid to the surviving members of a generation who had lived through two world wars, a flu pandemic and the Great Depression (and who everyone now pretends to have idolised). Surely, with a very small cohort of pensioners and a relatively much larger working-age population (thanks to the post-war baby boom), they could have been treated with more dignity. Sadly, the post-1997 reforms which cut pensioner poverty - like the winter fuel allowance and free bus travel - came too late for many of the Greatest Generation.

I'm so fed up of hearing about it. They knew. We all knew. I was at school at the time, a child, with no interest in politics. I knew.

How could we have known about the 2011 changes which affected us almost immediately and hit much harder than the 1995 changes? Crystal balls?

I also work for the NHS and am still working at 68.

Really? I was affected and was not told. Do you think that thousands of women are not being truthful then?

Hats off to you, I don’t know how you do it. By the time I took my state pension and retired I was done.

So many 'they all knew' messages flying around from all over the place, often from people who admit they themselves were at school at the time. So much sanctimonious smugness.

The parliamentary ombudsman decided procedures were not properly followed at some stage and that compensation is due to some women. Go and argue with the ombudsman.

I have a letter telling me that I would have to wait over almost six years longer than anticipated before I could claim my state pension. I had two years and a few months' notice of this. Please explain to me how I could budget to cover this shortfall.

Around 3 million women were affected in some way by this and some men too, but women (as ever) got hit hardest. Shouldn't it have been worthy of a TV campaign? Putting flyers in waiting rooms, posters on post office walls, articles in women's magazines etc was never going to do the job.

Once more for those in the cheap seats - the PHSO made a non binding recommendation which has about as much standing as the opinions expressed in a phone in hosted by Ant and Dec. The response from the government to the PHSO absolutely eviscerated the PHSO recommendation and rightly so because the PHSO recommendation was appallingly flimsy and not supported by the PHSO's own evidence.

All that matters is what the courts think and the High Court ruled in the government's favour.

Even the PHSO concluded that the government had no obligation to notify anyone at all of the changes because personal responsibility is a thing.

Around 3 million women were affected in some way by this and some men too, but women (as ever) got hit hardest. Shouldn't it have been worthy of a TV campaign? Putting flyers in waiting rooms, posters on post office walls, articles in women's magazines etc was never going to do the job.

It was everywhere across the mainstream media. It was unmissable - even to those of us who were too young to be affected by the changes. Do you really think that none of the major media sources would have pushed this incessantly as a huge story?

If the Tories brought in a sea-change that people would now have to wait years longer for their pensions, the Guardian, Independent and Mirror wouldn't have bothered making anything much of it? If Labour had done it, the Telegraph, Mail, Express and Sun would have just kept quiet?

Even for people who actively choose not to keep themselves abreast of what is going on by reading a paper, watching the TV and radio news and current affairs, keeping their eyes and ears open in general... surely they would have friends, family, associates, colleagues etc. who would have been talking at length about this massive unfolding saga? Other people who were going to be greatly affected - they would just have learned about having to wait years longer for their pension than they'd hoped and would just shrug and not think to mention it to anybody else? And this is even before the days of the internet and smartphones.

With regards to budgeting, wouldn’t you just remain work until you could afford to retire with enough to keep you going until you reached the new state pension age? Not ideal if you hoped to retire earlier but only the same as what everyone else has to do.

100% this. Surely it’s just the responsible and sensible thing to do?!

Why weren’t you regularly checking your pension entitlement? I’ve been checking it every few years since I started full time work in my twenties: to check the required qualifying years and projected retirement dates and so on. The Blair/Brown government reduced the number qualifying years down to 30 (from 39), and then the Coalition/Tories put them back up again: every few years I got letters from HMRC about the periods of time when you could buy back extra qualifying years/voluntary contributions, and when these windows closed. Every time I got these I checked my pension entitlement to see if I needed to make extra contributions and what my retirement date would be. (HMRC regularly sent letters about voluntary contributions periods at the time.) You could check your pension entitlement by phone; or online — even in the mid-2000s. So even if you had somehow missed the age equalisation for women in the 90s, surely you were checking these things? (Every time you got a letter from HMRC it had details of how you could check your entitlement!)

In 2007 the new Pensions Act raised the pension age to 68 for my cohort. Whenever I got a letter from HMRC about qualifying years and voluntary contributions, it had my new projected pension age in the letter. It was extremely annoying to regularly see that “68”, but I was well aware of that increase in 2007, because I have read ALL my letters from HMRC ever since I started work!
The Coalition govt brought the planned increases in pension ages forward in 2011, but weren’t you checking your pension entitlement anyway, especially if you knew you would be retiring within the next 15-20 years?

This is what I simply don’t get. If you were not aware of these changes, were you just taking absolutely no responsibility for your own financial planning? Even if you have always been on PAYE all your life, and worked constantly since 18 — your tax code gets changed regularly; HMRC often miscalculate tax; surely in that time you were getting letters from them with your tax code every year, the occasional over or underpayment, and occasionally logging in to Government Gateway (or the previous online system they had); and while you were in there you check your pension forecast as well?

Most people actually do this every so often. I’ve been doing it since I was 20, and I’m not far off 50 now! And people who are self employed, have been carers or SAHPs or have gaps in their employment history have to do this ALL THE TIME to sort out qualifying years, underpayments and overpayments, and get their tax code adjusted.

Even these days, when HMRC doesn’t send as many paper letters as before, you will still get payslips and P60s from work showing NICs and benefits, letters from HMRC about your tax code every year, etc. etc. Who simply never checks anything to do with their future pension and state pension entitlement, (especially over a period of 30 years when the qualifying years kept changing)? It’s a complete abdication of personal responsibility to say “I wasn’t told”. You’re meant to check! If you weren’t doing it, why on earth not? Most people simply can’t afford not to take proactive responsibility for their own financial future.

My mum is of WASPI age, and is a hoarder who never opened her post — especially financial post — for literally years at a time, and even she knew she had to proactively check her state pension entitlement every so often!

They should compensate them and anyone else caught up in the utter madness of equalising retirement.

Even today women earn 13% less than a man doing the same job and women with children generally take time off to look after children. So how can a women retire with the same pension as a man and hence how can women be expected to retire at the same age?!

So do you think we should just accept that women will never have the same earning power as men and lower our expectations of (and trust in) them accordingly? Maybe employers can take that into account when setting salaries for men and women doing the same job and deciding on who gets the promotions?

It's always worth their while remembering that a man would give them 5 more years of work and experience for their investment in his training, so John is already looking like a much better prospect for hiring than Jane from the outset, when they look at the bottom line.

What about women who never have children? Should they start off with a nominal SPA of 60, but then have it increased to 65, so they can be 'one of the blokes' as soon as they hit the menopause without having become a mother? Obviously they will still have missed out on the benefits of employers being able to treat them preferentially them because of their longer 'lifespan' in the workplace, as nobody could have known that they definitely wouldn't have children, but it was always a 'risk'.

What about men who end up as widowed/single dads or become SAHDs for a certain period whilst their kids are young? Should they be considered as 'honorary women' and get to retire at 60 as well, after having returned to the workplace once their kids are older? Or should Larry, who was widowed at 30 with 5 children, be expected to work for five years longer than Carrie, who never married, never had children and quickly rose to (and stayed at) the top of her profession until retirement?

You didnt listen to the radio or read a newspaper during that time? Yes I believe you are lying.

The idea of retiring at 60 is just .... wow 😮

They shouldn’t be compensated. Anyone who claims they didn’t know about the changes either lived under a rock, or is showing a degree of incompetence and inability to plan for their future that they should be embarrassed to admit to.

Don’t get me wrong i’d be pissed off at having to work till 66 instead of of 60

but I’m not seeing the need for compensation

You could very easily have discovered this for yourself if you’d paid attention. The onus is on you to take charge of your own affairs and pension planning; what more could the government have reasonably done to ‘tell’ you? The information was all out there. Your lack of self-responsibility shouldn’t be someone else’s burden.

the government didn't plan, they didn't account for the rising older population. They ignored this large fact and could have put money aside instead of which its workers paying pensions today and not enough workers so there has had to be cuts and the age increased.

If the government had planned, put some money away, invested money for the future, the age wouldn't have had to be raised, the money would be their now to pay for he pensions of record number pensioners.

If in the 1979 the government had started "nest" as an option to continue to retire at 65, this could have been an option, people would have had the choice. It would have given 40 years - which is a life time of working, to put extra away and keep retirement at the same age for those that choose that option

Honestly there are no words.