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'm another in the relevant cohort and I definitely don't want compensation. All my friends of my age, bar one, are very well off relatively speaking. In fact, I probably have one of the lowest incomes and I'm doing fine. We all knew that the pension age was rising for us well before we had to retire. I hope that if there is compensation it only goes to the women who really need it. If I get it, I hope there is an option to refuse it. If there isn't, it will be shared among my children and grandchildren.

Actually, she is still working, and it's a physical job.

Yes I think so.

Healthy life expectancy has dropped since pre covid. And it never rose by the same proportion as life expectancy. So those retiring at 70 won’t be “enjoying” the same number of years of retirement, even if they survive the same number of years.

What's her point?

Women who paid the full contribution believed that at 60 we would receive a full pension …at one time we were told after 30 years, which also changed. The government saved shitloads of money by not giving us our expected pensions…in my case around 22k, for other more or less. Why did we pay our full contributions in good faith if we knew this was going to happen? Which doesn’t mean I am not sympathetic to those coming later, but you lot have no idea the differences in wages / salaries and inequalities that we faced over our working lives. Which is why women are still receiving lower wages and lower pensions .

Quite. So much for meritocracy. It’s unusual to see the concept so totally disregarded and its absence celebrated.

Inheritance for a few lucky kids does not replace a system built on working for a living and earning an honest wage for honest work. A few gaining money no matter how little they have done to deserve it while those who work languish in rented slums is not equal nor fair nor a cornerstone for a stable society.

Why should those of us who inherit nothing and in fact have to use our work to build the inheritances of the feckless idle brats of the inheriting rich, why should we work for you?

Already many are giving up and turning to crime and drugs; those who haven’t are seeing that they have done everything right only to be taken for mugs. Anger is growing.

If your vision of inheritance continues, @CanaryChaffinch , it will lead to civil war, chaos and destruction in less than two generations.

I don’t understand your question - as it says they were both born at the same time. And by “subjected to” do you mean the changes?

So, you're suggesting that if women had known they would be paying in for full pension (as everyone does) which was at 65 rather than 60, they would have.....what? Stopped working so as not to pay in? Gone on strike? Refused to pay NI? What?

And "the government" didn't make any money, the tax payer, you and I, saved money.

To be honest I don’t care. You had enough notice. You failed to prepare. Go use your fat DB pension and your mortgage free house to get you through those tough years.

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘why did we pay our contributions in good faith’…. No one has any choice but to pay NI if you earn over the threshold and you’re an employee. It’s not an opt in/out system.

And it is not a pension pot invested for you either. It’s just another tax which is spent as soon as the government gets it on benefits, the NHS, among other things.

I agree. Am I paying NI in good faith, or because there is no alternative? I pay it but I really do not expect a universal state pension once I get there.
NI really needs to be got rid of and income tax just upped to make the difference. That would make it clear that it’s paying for things today (eg the current pensions) and not some personal pot that entitles you to something the gov isn’t allowed to change.

That’s not quite right. There was plenty of notice of the 1995 changes, no quibble about that at all. The 2011 changes were a different matter and the implementation of the transition was grossly unfair and totally confusing. There needs to be an apology for that but not compensation. An admission that it was a clusterfuck would go a long way.

Gosh you are scraping the barrel to list food banks as a benefit. Something that isn’t actually that easy to get - you have to be referred for a voucher and it’s only designed for one off situations. Plus the food is donated not government funded.

And the benefits you’ve listed do not benefit most of the working population, who are the ones being squeezed from every direction.

You had at the very least 15 years notice.

The oldest woman was around 45 when the changes were announced and discussed at length in every type of media around at the time.

You pay contributions just like everyone has to pay contributions, good faith or otherwise.

If you wanted to challenge it, the time to do so was when you were in your thirties and early forties. Not start moaning twenty odd years afterwards, and have collective memory loss about something just about everyone else remembers.

There was plenty of notice for all of them. You were all aware. You chose to bury your heads in the sand and now expect taxpayers to pick up the slack because of your lack of preparation. I think there’s a term for that…

Of the 1995 changes, yes. There was virtually no notice of the 2011 changes. There were women who had about 18 months notice of those.

You didn’t read my post, did you? I neither want nor expect compensation.

I did. Crying about not having enough notice.

i assume in ten years when they announce the end of the state pension for my generation I’ll be supported when I kick up this stink.

That’s plenty long enough to accept you’ll have to keep working. If you want to retire early you obviously have to put a lot of time and energy into it, but it’s not a right.

@WaryCrow I actually do agree with you! My point was just really stating the obvious that if such swathes of pensioners are lording it about then, bar those whose wealth is pension income or have to pay for care homes etc, there will still be many who I am sure will inherit and hope to pay as little tax on their unearned windfall as possible. Or will whinge about it.

I totally want young people to be able to buy a home if they want. It’s ridiculous that many show that they can pay rents when a mortgage payment could be similar (but yes maybe for a starter home in perhaps a not so desirable area as many of us oldies did).

I think all taxes should be simpler and more equal, and especially that income from work should not be higher than that which is received passively. Perhaps a fairer society would follow.

And men right? Thats a genuine question because I’ve never really understood why, if the main complaint is the lack of notice for the 2011 change, it’s only a campaign for women.

A campaign for everyone would probably have a bit more public support because a) the papers would probably be falling other themselves with stories of hard working men that we must all support and no one would be saying “silly man, you should have educated yourself a little more”, and b) it would avoid the criticism of “you’re just bitter and annoyed that the women’s state pension age went up to be equal with men’s therefore you’re unreasonable”.

Men always knew because they always had a retirement age of 65.

I'd rather they did this than abolished the two child cap.

Looking at the tables, that was a different change, in 2014.