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 😖😖😖😖

Thought I'd clicked on a thread about WASPI but somehow ended up in the Four Yorkshiremen sketch.

Lenders didn’t take women’s wages into account when assessing mortgage eligibility, some economists argue that women’s rights leading to most households having two incomes and lenders taking both into account was a contributory cause of house price inflation. Being sacked when you were pregnant was a passport to poverty, even if you don’t give a shit about women’s rights. Anyway, you’re going to persist in your belief that you’re more hard done by than any preceding generation so I’ll leave you to it.

Look im sure older women had things tough. But its the 'didn't get time to prepare' bit that makes no sense to me. WHAT preparation is there to do? You just have to work longer. Thats it. It sucks but its the only option.no amount of 'prep'is going to negate that unless you can afford to chuck tens if thousands a year more into your pension, in which case you probably don't need the comp. And its not 'working together is it? If older women get the payout everyone else will have to fund it. I don't see that as 'together'

18 months notice for a 6 year wait is not long imo. Some women were ready to give up work knowing that they only had to wait a small amount of time until they got their state pension and could live off savings or a part time salary. And then they are told actually it’s 6 years and they wouldn’t have the money to plug that gap. Financial ombudsman agrees it was wrong

They didn't get 18 months notification for a 6 year delay. Thats just not true. Here is the timeline:

• 1995: The Pensions Act is passed, increasing the state pension age for women from 60 to 65 between 2010 and 2020 to align with men's.
• 2011: The government accelerates the timeline for raising the state pension age for women, speeding up the process and raising the age to 66 for both men and women by October 2020.

So rhey already knew about the 5 years. And the ombudsman finding was about notification rather than the delay. I really wish people would stop exaggerating

@Ticklyoctopus “ It was the norm 30/40 years ago for a married couple to buy a ‘family home’ when they married with the anticipation of starting a family.”

This is rubbish. Are you really saying that from 1985 onwards this was the case?

Around that time I didn’t know anyone who got a mortgage on one wage. And neither do I recognise the scenario of buying a family home as your first home. I think for that - for those who could afford to buy - you need to go back to home buyers in the 50s or 60s. Mind you, my parents (and my dad was in a good profession) rented a small flat in a not great area as their first home. It was also quite normal not to live together - or even just move out of home and rent a flat for the fun of it - as even then when rents were fairer it made it pretty impossible for many also to save for a mortgage. In the fifties and sixties, it was also common to live with one set of parents after marriage, this itself would help the couple to save.

It is also wrong to assume everyone could afford to buy no matter your job. That’s where decent council housing came in. Or fairer rents. The shameful legacy of Thatcher and the money money money culture of her policies, and subsequent failures of government not to fix the sell off has contributed massively to the housing situation and costs today. It’s political consequences, yes you can blame voters for their choices, but no party has sought to fix that legacy.

Very few people I knew in the 70s/early 80s bought more than they needed for their first house. So a small flat or terraced house in, perhaps, not great or convenient areas. The only people I knew who went straight to a 3 bed semi - yes semi!!! - were higher paid professionals eg solicitor couple. Appreciate this is my experience but as such, it is valid. It was very common not to do things like holidays because even 2 wages and a mortgage didn’t leave enough.

Society changes and there are good and bad and easier and harder situations for all generations. That’s just how it is! I would actually hate to be young today - I mean teenage young - with regression of female stereotypes fuelled by day to day porn and social media pressure, among other things. But I would love the lower expectation of meet/engaged/married/kids and freedom women have to forge their own path, on their own, with or without a partner, whether opposite or same sex, that are here today.

edited for typo

And you can't pretend that incomes are the same now as 1990. Or maybe this is the root of the problem and you think they are.

Also why did you pick a house that is twice the price of the average UK house for your comparison? Do you feel entitled to a half million pound house?

Interest at 4% (possible today) on the cost of an average house at £290000 is £11600. Less than a third of the average income of £39000.

15% interest on £60000 ( the average house price in 1990 ) was £9000 or 2 thirds of the average income.

A homebuyer earning the median salary for their region in 1995 would have had to spend between 3.2 times and 4.4 times their salary on a house, depending on where they lived. In 2012-13, the last year for which complete data is available, the median house price had risen to between 6.1 times and 12.2 times median regional incomes.
In 1995, the median income in London was £19,000 and the median house price was £83,000, meaning that people were spending 4.4 times their income on buying a property. But by 2012-13, the median income in London had increased to £24,600 and the median house price in the capital had increased to £300,000, meaning people were forced to spend 12.2 times their income on a house.

Source - Guardian. And this was 2013 - it’s far far worse now.

Well I live in London (born here) so actually £500k wont buy you a big house at all. In fact a 2 up 2 down would probably be about that price if youre lucky. Or a 2 bed flat. Im middle aged so pretty lucky that im not in my late twenties and struggling as much as those guys.

This proves the point I tried to explain to you earlier. Houses cost 3 times 1 salary when that was all you could borrow. When you could borrow based on 2 salaries the price doubled.

Those figures are for borrowing. Paying the mortgage is more affordable with lower interest rates.

Sorry, still don't see how that justifies choosing a cheaper than average house for your 15% example and one which costs twice average for your 5% example. Anyone would think you were trying to massage the figures.

It was still more realistic than your 15% on a £300k house. If you're bothered about accuracy, that was a daft place to start.

Why?

Because houses weren't £300k back then. You can't use 2025 house prices to make a point about 1990s interest rates.

It was meant to demonstrate to the OP what 15% interest looked like as a percentage of income. I have given examples using 1990 price and interest, and 2025 price and interest in my reply above at 08.26.

I fall into the Waspi category (born late 1958) and my marriage ended in the early 90s leaving me with three children under the age of 10. The CSA was set up in 1993 so I was able to refer my ex-husband when he refused to pay maintenance (ironically he worked for what was then the DSS). He still refused to pay so they took it directly from his wages. The service was free then unlike today.

I also did a 'Return to the Office' free course through the Job Centre and basically re-started my career in 1995. There were opportunities back then and although my financial situation in retirement isn't anywhere near as good as my ex-husband's, I certainly don't think that it would be fair for all Waspi women to receive compensation paid for by the younger generations who have it much worse than I did in lots of ways.

Well this is what Google says and where I got it from:

In the 1980s, a 2-bedroom house in London would have cost significantly more than the UK average, with average prices rising from around
£27,760 at the start of the decade to nearly £60,000 by 1989.

But the exact issue is that the ratio of average house price to income is completely different to thirty or forty years ago. In many parts of the county to ratio is well over 12-14 times income today. Whereas it was a quarter or fifth of that in the 1970s-1990s. That means houses now cost four to five time more in real terms compared to incomes than they did then.

The ONS has income stats showing that the cohorts born after 1980 have actually lost income in real terms since 2000, whilst those born before 1970 have dramatically increased their income in real terms. And contrary to the popular imagination which thinks young people are constantly buying iPhones and jetting off on holiday, it’s actually the over-60s who are by far the majority consumers of foreign travel, tech, luxury goods, cars and assets compared to the working-age population.

I actually bought a 2 bed flat in London in 1998 (aged 19) for £72k. Unfortunately ex was a gambler who remortgaged so when we divorced we had about £5k profit each. That same flat would be about £450k now.
My salary at the end of the 90s was about £20 / 21k I think. Now its £33k. Obviously that's anecdotal.

Yes to this.

I was born in the early 1960s, so I'm just outside the WASPI age group. I don't think they should get compensation, for reasons I explained in an earlier post.

But in response to the question of intra-generational comparison, I do think my generation has in general terms had an easier ride than my daughters' (born in the early 90s) generation. I grew up without aspiration, my parents didn't see the need to educate a daughter and I worked in low-paid jobs until my kids were born. My marriage broke down when DD2 was a baby, leaving me a single parent with two small children, in low-paid jobs prior to the national minimum wage. That was very tough, and I'll never forget the constant worrying about being able to afford basics. However, when my DDs reached secondary school age, I was able to go to university making use of various grants and funding opportunities, including free after-school care. I was then able to get a "job with prospects" on what felt to me like a very comfortable salary, maybe about two-thirds of the national median salary. On that salary I was able to afford a deposit on a large flat and comfortably manage the mortgage repayments, as well as start saving and paying into a private workplace pension. I don't think women now in their 30s/40s would get a second chance anything like as easily, and two-thirds of the median salary is now about £25,000 which wouldn't be enough for someone without considerable savings to get onto the property ladder, so they'd still be paying exhorbitant rents. My salary then went up, not to anything lavish, but I earn just over the national median now: I've finished paying my mortgage off, and neither of my daughters need any more help from me financially so I've been maxing out my pension savings so that I can hopefully avoid being a burden to them as I get older. I can't imagine a woman following the same trajectory thirty years later being in the fortunate position I'm in now. Yes, there are younger women who went to university at 18 and straight into professional jobs who've been able to get on the housing ladder, but like-for-like, I do think things are harder now. I also think the world of work has got harder, less satisfying and more anxiety-ridden. I'm glad I'm coming to the end of my time as a worker, and I wouldn't want to be starting out or even mid-career in my sector as it is now, with decades still to go.

It's comparing apples with oranges, though. In this example, the only reason that women lost their privilege more quickly than men did was that men never had that privilege in the first place!

You may as well complain about how unfairly women's wages jumped after the Equal Pay Act, when men didn't see any of those same increases - because the men already had them all along!

But you and I were a fortunate generation sandwiched between less fortunate ones, less fortunate in different ways

Your whole post about yourself bears zero relevance to the WASPI

Good, who knows it there will even be a pension for our youngest workers? My 19 year old son shouldn’t be funding a payout for a group who have been treated very generously when it comes to pensions.

Well by that token we, as higher rate tax paying 70 year olds shouldn't be funding a pay out for childcare for working families with two incomes. Everyone in every generation has paid for the pensions of those older than them. It's taken the current generation to whine about it. (Or got their mothers to whine on their behalf)