Women's state pension age: Parliament debate - add your views?

[RowanMumsnet]

Hello all

Parliament's Petitions Committee has been in touch - having seen our webchat with Mhairi Black about women's state pension ages - to ask whether MNers would like to have some input into a Westminster Hall debate about the issue.

This debate is as a result of a petition calling for the government to 'Make fair transitional state pension arrangements for 1950s women' getting the required number of signatures for a Parliament debate.

The Committee is after MNers' thoughts on the following questions; you can see links to the first Commons debate here (video) and here (transcript).

What were the most important points in the first debate for you? What do you think should have been covered that was not?

What points do you think a second debate should focus on?

What questions would you ask the Minister following their response to the debate?

Your thoughts will be fed back to MPs taking part in the Westminster Hall debate.

Thanks
MNHQ

That's what I thought Garlic, never claimed benefits so wasn't quite sure, but yes it would be a no no

I'm 62 now. Originally I was told that if I paid a "full national insurance stamp " instead of "married women's " stamp, that I would be able to claim a full state retirement pension at 60. When I was 52, my retirement pension age was put up to 62. Then 64. Now it's 65.5 years. I will have paid full NI contributions for over 50 years by the time I finish work. The private pension I paid into for 12 years vanished along with my ex employer. I paid SERPS until it was stopped but I've been informed that I will not benefit by having paid into it. I'm currently facing redundancy again and will have only JSA to live on if I can't find an employer to hire a 62 year old. I'm single and so have no one to help me financially. I've only ever had a low wage so have minimal savings and certainly not sufficient to contribute to another meaningful pension . Am I angry? Yeah, I think I am. The women who were born in the 1950s have been well & truly stitched up over their pensions. I feel desperately sorry for the younger generation who may never have a state retirement age/pension to look forward to. And how can they possibly trust the new government pension programme, knowing that any future government can raid their pension pots because that's never been done before .

There has to be a cut off somewhere.

The average person is living for nearly 30 years post retirement. Pensions were never supposed to be paid that on. You want it sooner? We will all need to pay a lot more national insurance.

Those of us that have worked for 40 - 50 years, and have paid everything asked of us, without taking anything out, justifiably feel that we have been shafted. We were never told about the increasingly delayed retirement age, we were simply left to discover that for ourselves via media or if we happened to look on a govt website. Because our retirement ages were put back repeatedly, at very short notice, we had no opportunity to set up a private pension plan. No other strata of society has been shafted quite so diligently as middle aged women.

I agree with the pp's. I have worked since I was 16 and have paid a full stamp all of my life. I really am not sure how long I will be able to continue to work, (I'm a carer) and even right now, while I am able, I am struggling getting enough hours to be able to earn enough to live on. Where I live there are very few jobs available.

I also strongly feel that the government would never dare to do this to men.

All in all, my future is very depressing.

It is depressing my money. My joints are knackered! It is hard not to worry. I find myself envying those people who are strolling to the shops to get their paper in the morning as I set off for another exhausting day!

Meanwhile civil servants have 10 years grace to "Provide transitional protection for those closest to retirement" .

This has nothing to do with the state pension - this is for the Civil Service occupational pension scheme (average pension about £4k a year).

The civil service pensions are an incredibly good deal though phoebe.
I assume that those whose pensions are actually going to be £4k per year have been in relatively low paid work, worked part-time or have not been employed in the civil service for their whole working lives. The £4k is representative of what they have earned and the number of years of employment - and the amount is guaranteed and index-linked.
In a defined contribution pension scheme, to achieve an index-linked pension of £4,000 at age 60, you would need to have saved a pension pot of at least £150k. I doubt that anyone who is in line for a £4k civil service pension could have saved anything anywhere near that amount during the period of their employment, so they will be massively better off in retirement than their peers who have to accumulate their own pension fund and risk losing huge chunks of it when stock markets fall.
My own pension fund has in the past week lost the equivalent of 2 years worth of contributions!

I've been watching this debate for the past few months with interest. In my opinion what the govt are doing is grossly unfair. If you equalise pensions between men and women then men and women have to have equal experiences. Women of this generation fought for equal pay but many did not benefit from it, if they did then it is more recently, not their whole working lives. For many women they were barred from taking out personal pensions. They fought for women to have control over their own bodies; free contraception, abortion, the criminalisation of rape in marriage. They fought for free nursery places but again did not necessarily see the benefit, relying on family members to take care of children, so they could work for a few hours. Government policies take years to be embedded They were probably dual workers and now work, care for elderly parents and grandchildren, so their own children can work. A lot of these women will also have raised children on their own.
Yes, women do live longer than men but they do so in chronic illhealth.

Agree CS pensions are a very good deal 80s mum (or were, the scheme has changed now and is no longer quite as good as it once was). But I just wanted to be clear there are no special rules IRO state pension.

I paid SERPS until it was stopped but I've been informed that I will not benefit by having paid into it.

Golly, I'd forgotten about that! Yes, me too. It was a major priority - pay your full stamp plus extras. That way you'll be sure of a decent retirement, whatever happens.

Yeah, right

The average person is living for nearly 30 years post retirement.

Really? Do you have data, please?

It's difficult to believe the average man & woman are living to 95 and 90 respectively.

Garlic-that is exactly what I was wondering. I thought that average life expectancy was mid 70s for men, late 70s for women.

it's beyond difficult to believe. no one on my father's side of the family has lived past 72 (working class and worked full on their whole lives from a very early age) - they didn't get much out of their pensions.

i'd rather they added an element of means testing before they started depriving people who have worked hard for 50 years on low wages of a decent retirement age. why make someone who has done that keep working in a job that they're no longer really fit enough for and in fact is seriously damaging their health now but can't afford to stop for an extra five years to pay the pension of people who have hundreds of thousands of pounds in savings?

Yep - UK life expectancy expected to rise to late 80s by 2030, NHS.

And that is for babies born in 2030.

For people born in the 1950s it is 65-70!
But if we live past 65, we can expect an average of 20 years more.
overview
data
Perhaps the govt wants to shorten that by giving us more stress & less comfort??
Male life expectancy is going up faster than female, btw.

'Average' person living 30 years past retirement? What does this mean? Some people are living until they are 110 and some are only living until 75? And I agree, people living until they are 90/95 is still rare

This Life Expectancy Calculator is a good rough guide.

I think that Aviva calculator may be on the optimistic side (which makes sense in making sure people don't underestimate their longevity). It estimates my life expectancy as 94, and thinks it's more likely that I'll live to 100 than I'll die in my mid-80s.

It thinks I'm going to live to 89! I so am not

That calculator probably works much better for people who are in their twenties or early thirties.

Couple more calculators
www.confused.com/life-insurance/life-expectancy-calculator
media.nmfn.com/tnetwork/lifespan/#0

I lost 8yrs on last one for having used recreational drugs (oops)

Wow - on those calculators I get 92,93 & 95 !

I'm another one affected - now 60. Luckier than most on here because I have an occupational pension and was offered early retirement. I don't have many years in it as I was busy with children, but it gives me about 3k a year. I had planned to work till 66 to build up that pension, but my employer was making redundancies and basically asked for volunteers to jump. I decided that early retirement was the more sensible option than redundancy. I'm living on savings. When that runs out I will sell the house and downsize. as I say - one of the lucky ones but I do have friends in much worse situations. One, a teacher, is signed off work with ptsd following an incident with a teenage boy - she is horrified at the thought that she will have to keep working to 66.

I got 76 and 81 on the other two calculators. I think 76 is more likely for me, and I deserve more than ten years of pension! Somewhat off topic, I guess, but it certainly adds to the stress that's shortening my life.

The calculators have predicted that I'll live to 94, 94 and 95. I doubt it, frankly.

The scary bit is where one of them tells you that you can expect to have however many more years to live. Mine said 58 years, but what if it says 2 or something like that?

The calculators are of course only a guide, based on averages.

None of us knows how many years we will have to support ourselves in retirement - and that's the problem with retirement saving. How can I tell if I have enough saved to retire in 2 years time, when I will be 60, when I don't know if I will need to finance 10 years or 40 years?

My father died a few weeks after his 70th birthday. My mother is still ticking along at 89 and in good health (her mother lived to 97). Will I take after my mother or my father? Or neither?

Here's a radical idea. What if state pension was payable from the age of 80 and it was actually enough to live on? That would mean that I could be certain that, if I retired at 60, I would have a maximum of 20 years to finance. It would be so much easier to plan.

Of course, the pension age can't suddenly be changed to 80, but it could be phased in, so that anyone aged under 20 today would know that their state pension age is 80 and could plan accordingly. People slightly older today would receive theirs proportionately earlier. This could be phased in over a period of 60 years, so everyone would have plenty of notice.

Pension saving should be made compulsory and a person's pension savings should be protected by the state and not subject to the fluctuations on the stock market.

It is awful that these changes were made for women so close to retirement. How can women save more money for their pension when they are suddenly told very close to retirement, that they are going to have to work another 6 years. Totally unfair.