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?

You only had 7 years added to your working life if you mistakenly thought you had some kind of absolute right to retire at 60! Whereas I have never thought I had a right to retire at 65 anyway.

The state pension is a benefit like any other, and the government of the day can change that as they wish! If you didn’t realise that, that’s on you.

If the state retirement age was 60, why would you not expect to retire then? You are just being silly now.

Yes they are figments of your imagination. For example, interest rates weren’t in fact 14% in the 80s: they reached that level in 1990 for a very short period after the exit from the ERM. Inflation in the 1970s was actually good for the working population: it raised wages and eroded mortgage debt very quickly, leading to higher home and asset price ownership across the population. Childcare subsidies? You are laughing? My DD’s childcare cost 1500 a month and the “free” hours were equivalent to about £100 of that. And she did’t even go to nursery full time! (10 years ago).

I am one of those parents and have twins. I am yet to request compensation! But l don’t have raging entitlement so l suppose that’s why

The country is near on bankrupt, we cannot cannot justify this I am afraid.

Plenty of other things in life that are unfair - cost of housing for young people as an example.

The high interest rates didn’t last that long and surely everyone wasn’t affected by it. Some people will have had a mortgage in place and that would have just continued. Plus 10-15% on a mortgage of £40k or £50k really isn’t that much anyway. Quite different to if it was £290k (average house price in England in 2025 is about £300k)

But expectation isn’t some kind of right? Growing up I expected to be able to go to university without paying fees, buy an ordinary house at a normal price and afford to start a family in my twenties, just like my parents did. That didn’t happen either. Where’s my compensation?

Yes, and me. All those saying that we should have all been checking online for years don’t seem to understand that organisations and customers weren’t online decades ago. 🙄

But, the point is now is that a court has decided procedures weren’t followed properly, and after the fiasco of the WFP, the government are trying to persuade pensioners to vote for them in the future. As the Tories did. 🤷‍♀️

I don’t know it anything will be paid. If it is, it’ll be a bonus. If it isn’t, then ok.

There were no fixed mortgages, every single mortgage fluctuated in tandem with the interest rates. Hence half the country nearly being sick on its shoes on Black Wednesday.

The information was certainly online in the mid 2000s (now twenty years ago!) — and you could speak to HMRC by phone. Plus the usual way to check your pensions entitlement was to request a letter from HMRC, which my mum and MIL both certainly managed to do despite both being two of the least organised people on the planet. Why didn’t you do that?

Any recourse to public funds clearly depends on the availability of those public funds in the first place. Surely this is basic common sense?

If anyone below 60, even more so those far younger, believes they’re guaranteed a state pension at any specific age, they are very foolish indeed.

I am loving the way the massive mortgage hikes,are being airily swept aside as if they were nothing! I wish MN existed back then.6

We know that now. But we cannot and should not judge thus by today's knowledge.

At least you had MIRAS 🤣🤣🤣. My husband still finds the concept of that to be ridiculous

But that's the point: that societal norms were being changed for fairness and equality. There were probably initially lots of men who were outraged at the idea that a married woman might have an opportunity to do a 'man's job' and to actually be paid a 'man's wage' for doing it!

The very notion that a woman should be able to deprive a man of his rightful manly opportunity to provide for his family and taking away a full breadwinner's wage for her to waste on her frivolous personal spending!!

Maybe the men should seek compensation for the social contract and expectations being broken that took away their inherent huge privilege over women!! Should they have been entitled to 30 years' notice before it was brought in?!

Would it have been fairest to have locked everybody in based on their birthdate, and the societal norms that were in place when they would enter the workplace? So women born before the Equal Pay Act would have been locked in to pitiful 'women's wages' for life, whilst their younger female colleagues woukd earn far more, commensurate with the men?

Equality means equality. We may not be there yet, but either we accept that things need to change for the greater good of and fairness for everybody or we just bumble on forever acknowledging that we as a society embrace very different rules for two distinct classes of people based on sex.

Expecting equal treatment whilst still demanding the patronising and often infantilising special privileges that you had previously (however nice they may have seemed) is a big retrograde step.

@catontheironingboardit's not just about checking or failing to plan.

Imagine you are three years away from drawing your state pension. You confirm this with HMRC. You are having difficulty continuing to work, perhaps because of your health or your caring commitments, and you calculate that if you give up your job you can just about get by until your pension kicks in, so you resign. By this time you're probably two and a half years from drawing your pension. Shortly after that the accelerated changes are announced. These mean that whatever was going to enable you to get by for two and a half years now has to stretch over five. What can you realistically do? You can try to get back to work but at your age and with the health/caring/whatever situation that led you to stop work in the first place, you may not be able to find one. If you can't you'll be very much worse off than you would have been if you'd continued to work, perhaps just reducing your hours.

This is not directly comparable to other cliff edge situations, though I agree that they may also be unfair. In this situation someone who has planned carefully and relied on information provided by HMRC is abruptly placed in an invidious position with no obvious remedy, through no fault of their own. Surely they deserve to be compensated. It may be that they can't be identified or that the country can't afford it, but these are different arguments. I imagine that's hard enough for them to hear without also being insulted by people saying it's all their fault for not having checked.

Apart from anything else - and all of the much publicity about it over several years - wasn't it blatantly clear which way the wind was blowing wrt pension ages?

Did women really expect that wages and workplace rights for men and women would equalise by law, yet the huge elephant-in-the-room anachronism of women getting to retire 5 years earlier (in spite of living on average several years longer than men) was going to continue on and on indefinitely for decades. Wouldn't you at least have this in mind when cautiously making plans thaf involved burning any bridges?

As far as I'm aware, no official government notification has ever gone out advising any older age than 68 for retirement... yet people in their 20s and 30s now are openly expecting the age to either have soared by the time they can claim it or, more likely, thaf the state pension will no longer exist at all by then. Why are they all planning for this, when no government has actually told them that this will be the case?!

Yes agree society norms are changing all the time. The points in this case is the fact that those women who were born in 1950 began work at a time when equality regarding pay was different but also opportunities, they didn’t have the chance to train for “men’s“ work so they didn’t have those opportunities in the same way as people born 15 years later did. That in itself isn’t enough in my view for them to receive the pension they were originally guaranteed, the point that it happened so late is a contractor’s factor as well so it’s a combination of things. It isn’t simple or based on one reason. It is complex and sometimes decisions need to be based on varied issues and in this case it is more nuanced.

How was information online in 2005 of any use when the most painful changes were made with barely any notice in 2011? WASPI made a huge mistake not focusing on the 2011 changes and the appalling implementation.

I’ll start by saying I don’t really understand pensions, this doesn’t make sense to me. You planned to retire for example in 2000 and in 1998 you find out you can’t retire until 2003 how does that disadvantage you if you’re paying in for another three years. Or is it just that you didn’t want to work for three more years? Genuinely don’t get it.

So do I, it was a drop in the ocean when interest rates were in double figures though.

Surely if the Ombudsman and* *IF the law courts say women have been treated unlawfully then they are vindicated and any entitlement to compensation should be paid out. If this previously unknown information doesn’t impact a lawful decision then the current position stands. It’s not about which generation had it hardest.

Well I certainly didn't! My son did a pension forecast for me after my divorce in 2000 and told me I had my 30 years pension credits. I returned to work and about 6 years later it was a junior staff member who announced to a group of us (all nurses) Do you lot know you will have to work until you are 65?' We all thought she was joking! None us had, had any official notification! I think think this younger staff member had read it in one of those trashy newspapers that I never would have read. Had to do another pension forecast to confirm it. I did however get a letter telling me it was going up to 66 about 18 months before hand. It is despicable the way this group of women have been treated. A lot women had planned to retire at 60 in order to look after elderly relatives or to help look after grandchildren so their son's and daughters didn't have exorbitant child care costs! Social media was not a big thing back then. By the time I got home from work it took all my energy just to cook for my teenage family do some household chores and go to bed. Let alone time to read newspapers or watch TV. If I had been sent a letter for the 1st pension age increase I definitely would have read it. Also Angela Madden who worked full time for the Post Office a Government owned institution and she was never informed! https://www.facebook.com/reel/3261589430686492

Also the state pension is very different from a private pension, insofar as you don't actually invest or sign any contractual agreement.

Much as people like to say that they 'paid into' their pensions for however long, they didn't. What they did was to pay the taxes that they were legally obliged to pay for however many years and then, upon attaining a certain government-prescribed age (which can change over time), and maybe with a requirement for having paid NI contributions (or being otherwise credited with having done so) for a certain amount of time, they then qualify for the benefit which is referred to as the state pension - regardless of whether they decide to stop working (or go part-time) or not. Like it or not, somebody receiving the state pension is a benefits claimant.

Just like if you claim out-of-work benefits, after having been in work beforehand for many years - you may quite legitimately reason that you've paid in to the system for years and so reconcile that with it being 'morally fair' that you having paid in when you could and now are being paid out by the system when you need it; however it would be absurd to claim that you 'paid into your unemployment benefits' (or maternity pay, or SSP), as though it were a scheme with a built-in entitlement. That's just not how society works.

My parents both died well before they reached state pension age, so in spite of their having paid taxes and NI contributions for years, they never received any state pension, as they never fulfilled all of the requirements to qualify for that benefit from the state.

By stark contrast, they had also paid into a private pension, which they never lived long enough to claim under the age-related terms; BUT as it was their money, that they had paid in to a scheme that was specifically set up and ringfenced for them, my DSis and I eventually received that money - because it was effectively their savings.

The government wasn't involved (other than in regulating the private scheme), so it wasn't a state benefit, as is the state pension. That scheme was exclusive to them: nobody else had paid into it and nobody other than them (or their heirs) could benefit from the capital that it earned.

Just like if Reeves had succeeded in her plan to take benefits away from disabled people who couldn't work, however morally justified, none of them could have claimed that she had taken away money that they had 'paid in to' and were thus 'entitled' to, even if they'd paid £30m in tax before becoming disabled.

Governments change goalposts - and they have a right to do so. I'm amazed that people ever choose to rely on them to 'do the right thing', to be honest.