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?

Agreed. I have to work until I’m 68, and it may go up again, that’s just life.

How is £1000 compensation per WASPI going to help?

But how were any younger cohorts hit any less hard?

Because they had more notice. The first change was fair enough, there was plenty of notice and it was well publicised, most women received letters. The 2011 Act hit a two year cohort of women who were at that point very close to retirement age - or thought they were. This explains it very clearly.

https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/publications/womens-state-pension-age-our-findings-department-work-and-pensions-communication/background-relating-changes-state-pension-age-women

"I missed out on four months pension payments because I was born eight hours too late!"

I can understand why the current generation refer to "boomer entitlement" when people complain about missing out on four months of pension when the people paying your pension / possible compensation have to miss out on years of pension payments in comparison. That's if they get any state pension at all

That's on top of record taxes, austerity, mountains of student debt etc

Way to miss the point. That wasn’t a complaint, it was to illustrate the lunacy of the way the transition was designed. You seem to think that you’re the first generation ever to pay others’ pensions. I did exactly that for almost 50 years and spent the first 35 years of my working life with my tax repaying WW2 debt - that finished eight years before I was born.

I never expected or wanted any compensation, I don’t think most of us did but some acknowledgement that the 1953-55 cohort bore the brunt of the 2011 changes wouldn’t hurt you.

I don’t really understand the furore around this either - women were given years of notice that the pension age would be pushed back. It was all over the news for a long time. So they had to work for longer ….welcome to our lives. Women had access to the information but seemingly buried their heads about it / chose to ignore it. I have little sympathy to be honest

My DM was older than the boomer cohort and lost out because when she was younger always made additional contributions to receive more state pension, and by the time she retired they pretty much equalised everything up regardless of additional contributions so she could have just kept her money years earlier. But never moaned about it, got on and enjoyed her retirement.

She didn't have years and years out of the workforce raising children as my mum and dad decided they could only afford me, and has also waited until their 30s to have a child. Seems like the generation that followed them didn't have the sense they were born with. When boomers say "Oh, there weren't as many opportunities for women then" no there weren't but there were even fewer for my mum, and my parents both came from very ordinary working class backgrounds and managed to do ok. My mum was even the main earner in her 40s and 50s.

I would love to explain this to me too!
whenever I read these threads I never understand what the financial hardship element is - surely once the age moved, you just retired later ?
or am I missing something key

One thing I’ve never understood is why the WASPI campaigners include all women born in the 50s and seem to be campaigning about all the changes. As far as I know the only ones significantly affected by the 2011 act were those born between April 53 and April 55. Everyone else had over 15 years of notice of the move to 65, and exactly the same notice as everyone else about the changes from 65 to 68. If they’d stuck to just that cohort and also only campaigned about the acceleration I might have had an iota of sympathy.

I certainly have no sympathy for people who chose not to engage in any news source or any discussion about current affairs and therefore claim they didn’t know about the 1995 changes. I would be disgusted if they were compensated.

I guess there would be a tiny proportion of people who had already retired in 2011 and had budgeted savings through to when they expected to get their pension in 2015, but they then had to wait to 2017 instead. If they’d already left their job they might find it hard to get another. But I don’t have very much sympathy even there as the need for further changes was so widely discussed long before 2011 so anyone planning early retirement should have factored that into their plans.

"I did exactly that for almost 50 years and spent the first 35 years of my working life with my tax repaying WW2 debt - that finished eight years before I was born"

And yet you seem spectacularly oblivious /unaware that this generation has lower taxes, cheaper houses, generous defined benefit pension today's taxpayers can only dream of, higher benefit payments in real terms, NHS dentistry freely available etc.

Real wages gave been stagnant for 17 years and the waspi campaign still wants today's taxpayer to subside a retirement they'll never have.

Check your boomer privilege.

Yes, I believe that most of the women who insist they didnt know about the change in pension age, were not working.
Otherwise they would have been clued up or told of the change by their colleagues. Every Waspi aged woman that I knew, just carried on working longer.
Which makes me wonder what the others were living on anyway. Benefits? Husbands wages?
Would this have just stopped between 60 and 65?

I am in the cohort of the worst hit and I think if WASPI had concentrated on us we would have got compensation, as it was it completely put of hand by people who saw £ signs and jumped on the bandwagon.

I agree. The silly demands for six years worth of compensation to effectively reverse the changes were always doomed. And once the government couldn’t satisfy the campaigners and get a PR win they may as well just say no across the board.

Lower taxes - basic rate income tax was 33% with 9% NI when I started work. Basic rate taxpayers were paying the same % as today’s high rate.
Cheaper houses - if you could get a mortgage with only one income taken into account
Generous pension - many schemes were closed to women
Higher than what benefits?
Free dentistry is a fat lot of use when there are no NHS dentists

Most of us were working during the last 17 years when wages were stagnant and many, if not most, of us are still taxpayers.

Check your millennial facts.

We're ALL dying slowly - women and men - including a baby who was born yesterday; that's how life goes.

The WASPI women seem to somehow think that they're far more special than everybody else, including all future generations (of both sexes) who will not receive a state pension any earlier than 67 and, being honest and realising which way the wind is blowing, before too long never at all.

It's interesting how they always look back and compare themselves to the women who lived before them in bemoaning how hard done-by they believe themselves to be, rather than to all of the women who will come after them - many of whom will also have to pay a graduate tax for decades (Angela Madden has two degrees, that she is rightly proud of - but how much did she have to pay in tuition fees and additional taxes afterwards for them?) and may not even get a state pension themselves, ever.

I would save your breath @BIossomtoes they don't want to know.
Nothing you or anyone else can say will shift the conviction that younger people are the most disadvantaged generation ever in the history of the world. The issues faced by earlier generations count for nothing because theirs are worse.
And I am laughing at the assertion by a couple of pps that they would be absolutely fine with being told two years before they retired that they had to work another six years. Of course they would.
Also laughing at the apparent recklessness of assuming you will retire at published state retirement age without carrying out extensive checks that nothing has changed. As if.
FWIW, I don't think WASPI women should be compensated because their hardship has basically been and gone and £3000 or whatever will do nothing to alleviate a problem that occurred years ago. Plus the country can't afford it.
However this dies not excuse the ignorance, spite and sheer unpleasantness on this thread, but it is ever thus on threads that suggest previous generations had their struggles too.

I agree . I absolutely remember many conversations at work from those of us who had our pension ages increased. The conclusion being that we would now have to work for longer, not that we would have to make other financial plans, unless we were still planning on retiring at 60 I suppose. I did in fact retire a couple of years before my 66th birthday, but I did that in the full knowledge that I wasn’t going to get my state pension at that point. Maybe if you weren’t working you were less aware ? But it really was everywhere at the time, I even remember my then teenage daughters commenting that they’d have to work longer.
I do feel a bit uneasy at the thought of getting compensation for something I really did know about, as did many of my colleagues.

"Check your millennial fact"

I am not a millennial

I can and do recognise how stealth taxes, trickle down economics means that I can recognise that for millennials onwards many people will never be able to afford any houses, never mind buy a house and raise multiple kids on one wage.

But you keep stewing over your four months of missed pensions payments.

Of course it's always been the way that younger people pay for the pensions of older people; and then the next generations of younger people pay their pensions when they get old. This is the only way the system can reasonably work, and it will work this way right up to the last generation who end up paying for their elders' pensions but who are also the first generation never to get a state pension themselves.

But how do you think that the 1953-55 cohort bore a massive brunt that somehow hasn't become the new norm for everybody born ever since?

It's not an outrageous scandal that devastates one group of people in history through to disgusting (non-)actions by the government - such as Windrush, Infected Blood, Post Office and others which everybody agrees must never be allowed to happen again; it was a carefully considered change to the nation's economic policy, based on the simple figures, as we see all the time - which invariably means that one group will be the first (of many) to lose out under the new rules.

But how do you think that the 1953-55 cohort bore a massive brunt that somehow hasn't become the new norm for everybody born ever since?

The link I posted explains it quite clearly.

House prices carry a lot of heavy lifting in the endless navel gazing about how younger people have the hardest lives ever.
Subsidised childcare, flexible working, generous maternity leave and pay, paternity leave, equal opportunities, home and hybrid working, UC, workplace pensions etc are brushed aside.
Earlier generations had much shorter maternity leave, crap maternity pay, no flexible working, no paternity leave, no WFH, patchy pensions etc but lower house prices (with no fixed rates and interest rates of up to 15% at one point).
The struggles of today's young families are not unique, they are just different.

Yes, it’s sad that even young women see old women as worthless. Oh the irony!

Then, of course, if the government did pay compensation to effectively reverse the changes for them, that then kicks the can down to the next generation, who then become the first to effectively lose out from the changes and so demand compensation, and if they get it, then the next after them...

This is rubbish. They are asking for compensation over the way the information about the changes was badly handled, not the actual changes.

If you’re going to involve yourself in the discussion, you could at least get your facts right.

So we're going round and round in circles and it's all just about the notice, then? Even though it was everywhere in the 90s (and beyond) and very clear to anybody with any cursory interest in current affairs what was going to happen.

I was a very young adult at the time - so hardly the age to be that bothered about news about pensions - partly because it was decades away and, indeed, partly because I knew it would almost certainly change much more over the coming years; but I clearly remember all of the media coverage. It wasn't something that I had to research into - which, at my age then, I wouldn't have bothered to do - but it was screamed at us from every media angle. I'm astonished that people who were then much older and wiser than I was, and who were much closer to it being relevant in their lives, seemed to manage to miss all of it.