Govt considering u-turn on WASPI compensation

[Ticklyoctopus]

https://news.sky.com/story/government-to-reconsider-whether-to-give-compensation-to-waspi-women-13468696

Oh God no 😖😖😖😖

I'd rather they did neither and instead not increase taxation further which only leads to the economy slowing down even more meaning we then have to increase taxation again in a year's time and so on in an economic doom loop.

Like @negroany , I struggle to understand how people would have acted differently had they more notice. I am a few months younger than most of the affected cohort. I, and everyone I know, just shrugged and thought "oh well, work a bit longer"...what else could we have done? Invested in conglomerates maybe? Indulged in a bit of venture capitalism? Surely working longer means you earn more and can save more?

I suspect the campaign groups (waspi etc) are mostly comfortably-off women who
a) had the money with which they could have done something different, like invest it
b) were not relying on their state pension so didn't need to check carefully. They could take early retirement from their jobs and assumed the state pension would be there for the claiming.

If the campaign groups had worked for support for cases of genuine hardship, I think they would have had more success. (Why? Even the well-off who say they don'tneed it? Even those many who were informed, whetherby formal or informal means)?

A targeted compensation scheme would have been more affordable and would have garnered more sympathy...On the other hand, it may also have meant the campaigners wouldn't qualify for a pay-out for themselves.

The problem with the WASPI argument is that it basically insists that the Government has to personally track down individuals and inform them of any and all changes that affect them - otherwise those changes aren't allowed to happen.

There will always be someone who didn't get the memo, however good the information campaign. Does that mean they have the right to be excluded from anything that might negatively affect them?

Clearly many thousands of people understood perfectly well that their pension age was rising. The ones that didn't should not be absolved of their personal responsibility to be aware of things that affect them.

And let's ask ourselves - what exactly would these women have done differently had they known about the changes? What actual financial detriment have they suffered by not knowing this sooner?

But the point at which you have made enough NI contributions to be eligible for the full state mention isn't the point that you can start claiming your pension and/or stop paying any more NI.

You ask why you paid your full contributions in good faith. You did it so that when you do reach retirement age, you can receive the maximum amount of state pension. Your contributions haven't been stolen from you.

I am in the WASPI category. I definitely knew about the change, and I don’t scour the papers for such things, so the information must have been fairly freely available. I doubt if anything will come of this though.

👏🏼👏🏼

I work in public service pensions and remember sending mail shots out to our members in 2011.

I am 45 and the earliest I will retire is 68. There is no money for them

Exactly. I’m 46 and my pension forecast states I have already paid my contributions (started working at 14 albeit part time). I won’t receive my pension until I’m 68. How many years have been “stolen” from people (women and men!) like me?

Good I'm glad you agree there are women who had their retirement ages changed from 60 to 65 with 15 years notice, and that it's only the women and men whose retirement age changed from 65 to 65+ who were given short notice.

Those are the only people who warrant sympathy.

That's nonsensical.

The 2011 change, with very short notice, was that the state pension age of 65 was increasing.

This applied to both women and men, and both sexes were shortchanged because of the increase at very short notice.

Unlike the women who had fifteen years to get used to the state pension age for women increasing to 65.

It's the 65 to 65+ people who deserve sympathy if there's any sympathy to be had.

In the government white paper that came out a couple of years ago there were various case studies. (They're as laughable as the personal stories on the WASPI website).

There was one case study where a woman had retired at 60, waited to be paid, and when it didn't happen phoned up to find out where her pension was, and was told she'd get it at 65.

Considering a big argument for these women is that they were never personally informed of the changes by the government, didn't this woman wonder why she hadn't received a personal letter to tell her when her pension would start?

Instead of worrying about this Waspi issue @Ticklyoctopus , maybe better to focus on fact your kids are around someone who seems absolutely appalling with fuck all moral compass.

And treats their mother ie you! Like 💩

Exactly, I have zero sympathy for this case. How do you not take basic steps to confirm that you are going to be paid, before giving up your other income? This is like expecting sympathy for quitting a job without another one lined up, in fact without even bothering to check job boards to see if there are any jobs to apply for...

Women didn’t have 15 years notice of the change to 65. My revised pension age in 1995 was 61 years and six months. It leapt to 64 years and six months in 2011 and there were hundreds of thousands like me.

Exactly this. I seriously hope those greedy, entitled 'waspi' chancers don't see a penny compensation.

Your user name is a good joke. This is the saddest thread I think I have ever read on mumsnet. You see people older than you who you perceive to have more than you and you just can't bear it. Stop and think that perhaps you will have more than you do now when you are their age.
Why don't you pour some of your vile vitriol on young people who pretend to be too ill to work? That would help the public finances more year after year than a one off payment to a group who were systematically discriminated against for their whole working lives, and continue to have to put up with abuse from younger women who benefit in ways that today's pensioners could never have dreamed of.
Fewer than 10% of people aged over 60 now went to university.
It was legal to pay women less than men (which obviously made saving for a pension more difficult)
It was legal to sack a woman for being pregnant.
Maternity leave was 6 weeks. If you took longer you had no right to return to work.
There was no subsidised child care, in many areas there was no childcare.
Most people started work at 15. By the time they reach pension age they will have worked 51 years. This is actually more than people who now mostly go to university and start work at 21, they will have worked 46 years by the time they get their pension.
So I and I'm sure many other 1950's born women would be perfectly happy to justify my position. Perhaps people working part time and claiming in work benefits, or people expecting the taxpayer to subsidise their childcare should be required to justify theirs.

Not a single one of your points is a reason to pay them compensation. Sorry.

In fact even if any of the historical unfairness youention WERE a reason to pay compensation then surely the people paying it would be those who caused or benefitted from those injustices. So that would be older people as well then. Since the people who would end up paying right now would have been kids or not born in the 1970s and 80s

And envy of others is no reason to be abusive.

Who is being abusive?

@Sexentric You for a start. I am neither greedy not entitled. I can't be bothered going further back through the rubbish on this thread to find more examples.

Hopefully, if nothing else, the publicity surrounding this will finally serve as a warning to all people who somehow can't fathom that the world changes, governments change, policies change, the economy changes, circumstances change - very, very often.

Even if the government of the day tells you categorically what the current situation is, you simply cannot assume that this will still be the case after the next budget, let alone decades down the line, with whoever happens to be in government then bound never to change anything.

It's incumbent on all of us to keep up to date with the basics of current affairs - at least as far as they might affect us personally. You just can't go through adult life assuming that nothing will ever change - or that, if it must change, somebody will bring a letter to your door and read it to you personally to make certain that you've understood, 30 years before any changes will take place.

The more I read BS like this the more I want the WASPI’s like my mum to get something

Not all people over 60 are living the high life just the same as not everyone in their mid 20s are struggling to buy a house

People doing well and people struggling happens for all age brackets but some of the vitriol on this thread about older women (usually their MILs but that’s typical MN for you) who are apparently living in gold plated luxury is frankly ridiculous

A lot of these points are just not as simple as you claim, or you’re really overstating the case here.

Take education, for example. It’s a widespread but totally false claim about university. The reason is that yes, fewer people went to university in that cohort, BUT an additional 30+ percent had free tertiary education and training in the polytechnics, further education colleges and in workplace training schemes (eg. in nursing, teacher training and so on). These were all free and came with grants. BUT all of these are now university degrees, and the student pays fees to train in them. The actual proportion of the population with tertiary level education is not very much more at all than your generation once you take that into account; and none of you paid any fees for any of it, never mind starting your working life with a mortgage-sized amount of debt.

Equal pay isn’t a new thing. The Equal Pay Act was 1970. The working conditions you describe haven’t been the case since the 1980s at the latest. Yes, it’s taken a long time. Yes, women are still disadvantaged in the workplace compared to men. Yes, some employers still break the law. But paying women less than men for the same work hasn’t been legal since 1970.

Facing some social injustices during a whole working lifetime still doesn’t qualify you for compensation for something completely different. I get a much less good deal on just about everything in life than my parents did. I had no grant, student debt, it was less easy to get a job, houses rocketed in price, the nice defined benefit pension schemes were all closing to new entrants by the time I got there, I missed out on the tax credits, childcare and Sure Start centres of the Blair years which were closed down by the time I had my daughter; she missed out on the Child Trust Fund that children got under Brown which the Tories shut down; my income actually shrank in real terms in the 2000s and 2020s whilst my parents’ generation’s income grew; housing became unaffordable; my pension age rose; etc. etc.

Do I get to demand compensation for all these things? Why not? Because the pensions ages aren’t designed to compensate you for anything. They reflect what the state can afford.

But my pension age in 1995 was 65 and in 2007 it went up to 68. The fact that the change was accelerated in your case only really results in the same thing: both of us have to work an additional three years to get the state pension. Whether you have a shorter or longer notice period doesn’t really change that, does it? In either case the outcome is the same whether it was an unwelcome surprise or a grim long term forecast. I’m sure in a few years it will rise again, and I fully expect that in reality I may not be able to retire until beyond 70. So don’t you see why younger people aren’t that sympathetic to the idea that it’s a terrible disappointment not to be able to retire at 61…?!

The compensation that the government was advised to pay wasn't because the pension age was raised, but because the women involved were not properly informed.