'WASPI women' appeal court ruling

[GrimSisters]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54158832

I'm 41. I'd always wondered why women retired at 60 and men at 65 and have known all about the changes for years because I read the news and don't live under a rock.

Given that, at the moment, I'll get my state pension at 68, I'm struggling to understand what the problem is. Please could someone explain why having to work until 65, along with their male counterparts, is so distressing?

I thought we wanted equality? Must admit that I'm struggling to have much sympathy. I work in a relatively low paid job and have four colleagues aged between 55 and 63 who haven't complained about the situation.

If you're one of the women who has been affected by this change, I'd be interested to know what the real issue is because I'm really confused as to why it is such a massive issue.

Now that the judgement has been made over discrimination, we can and should put in claims for maladministration, take it to the Ombudsman and put pressure on the DWP which has been hopeless and giving misinformation from day 1.

Can anyone also confirm what I read was that a reason women were able to draw pension at 60 was that husbands tend to be older in more cases than wives being older. Men were main breadwinners (almost without exception pre 1975), so when they retired at 65 they would have to support their wives for up to a further 5 years on just the husbands pension (bear in mind a lot of wives didn’t, couldn’t work or with female wages pre 1975 earns pin money) . The 60 age for women meant couples would retire at same time and both receive state pension ( albeit the wives pension was reduced based on married women’s stamps). It was designed to stop married couples having to live off a single mans pension.
Even though attitudes to that may have changed, women, and their husbands in many cases, of that era made choices about career and pensions based on that knowledge and assurance on pensions- which WAS a given in those days.
No one can make meaningful pension savings etc with less than 10 years notice at an age of 50- you need to start early and young.
Not only were the women affected never written to personally , the change was announced and then massively accelerated by a later government...even where women did know the goal posts changed multiple times and too fast to do anything to mitigate.
If women had equal state pensions In the first place, to their male counterparts, then maybe the equality argument would be valid. But many do not, they were sold a dud idea on discriminated wages to pay reduced stamps- a con to save employers and Gov. money. And now even that has been taken away. Shameful to have made the change at such short notice and dreadful cutoff points.
In fact the state of most women’s pension provision is shameful- read the stats about % of women vs men with private/employers pension pots etc.

@WinterIsGone - I don’t agree that waspi women necessarily have the worst of both worlds. Of course sexism in the workplace was much worse in the past than it is today (although things are still not perfect). I don’t think the lower pension age for women was ever intended to address that though, nor should it. But that generation of women have benefited from things like rising house prices and much better workplace pension provision. Also as I said earlier, previously NI contributions were paid for women in receipt of child benefits for 18 years- now it’s only 12.

The younger generation (ie my dds) certainly have a better workplace to contend with than I did but they have their own issues and difficulties (eg housing, loss of db pensions etc). I absolutely don’t think they have it easy and it’s completely wrong to expect them to pay for a longer retirement for the waspi women that they won’t get themselves.

The court of appeal determined conclusively there was no discrimination and I agree. The pension ages should be equalised and there was plenty of notice. While I would like to retire earlier I realize how much expensive universal pensions are and it’s not fair to ask for the taxpayer to pay for that given longer life expectancies.

@30yearstomorrow - women do have equal state pensions to men. The reduced stamp was abolished in 1977. You only need 30 years of contributions for the previous state pension (35 now).

But that generation of women have benefited from things like rising house prices and much better workplace pension provision

What was the point of a workplace pension when you had to give up work if you had children or in some cases it was frowned upon to work if you were married

As for the rising house prices. House prices didn’t just rise and never fall.

I am a few years younger than these women and remember being wiped out in the 90s recession and my parents being wiped out in the 70s recession.

Just because things have gone up since the 1950s, didn’t mean to say they didn’t ever go down.

As it's 3.4 million people there are going to be extremely varied circumstances.

At minimum wage it's 2 or 3 days out of 7 to earn the same amount. Plus paid leave. So 90 to 130 days work a year. If you are fit to work of course.

What was the point of a workplace pension when you had to give up work if you had children or in some cases it was frowned upon to work if you were married

My mother retired with a better pension than dad but then no one cared about working class women with children like her working.

Maybe at 18 when I chose my career as a nurse I should have anticipated that once meopause came by I would be exhausted and yet still expected to work 12 hour days running about on my feet and lifting, which they also forgot to tell me would happen when training as back then it was 8 hour days.
We shouldn't have to take our life choices from Mystic Meg. She didn't know either. I'll not get to 35 years only 30 so won't even get my full OAP. I had no idea of the changes I happened to be abroad when it happened. So found out when I came back thinking I'll still get in my 30 years and had been paying my national insurance from there while gone.
Men don't take time out for babies they don't get those gaps in pension. I got 8weeks off with the first child. A year would have been unheard of.
At 20 you think you will be invincible forever. Most of us do.

Ah yes, the myth of all us boomers having our own homes worth hundreds of thousands! I had a house and then there was a recession in the late 80's early 90's, interest rates of 15%. Still at least we still had the option of council housing then. But of course, I'll be paying rent till I die. Is no one working class in your world CayrolBaaaskin?

Also, the married woman's stamp may have been abolished but you didn't get a pension in your own right if you were married or co-habiting. It was reduced if you were a couple.

@Oliversmumsarmy these women are retiring now or in the last 10 years. They are not much older than I am. We are not talking about a generation of women who had to give up work because they were married. It’s 2020.

My point is that each generation has its own issues. The massive rise in house prices has generally benefited that generation while disadvantaging millennials. There’s no reason the waspi generation should have a lower state pension age - they got plenty of notice to prepare as much as they could and it’s dd generation who will have to pay for it.

We will all have to retire later now because of longer life spans. Generally it was the boomers who were they anomaly - the generations before that did not have such long retirements.

@talkingdeadscot indeed lots of people in my world are working class. Many of them were able to buy houses. That’s something that is much more difficult for millennials. In fact any affordable housing- the waspi generation benefited from cheap plentiful council housing for rent too. With a right to buy and make a massive profit.

The state pension age has to go up because life expectancy has and it’s very expensive. That’s life. I don’t agree that the waspi women are some kind of special case. They’re not.

@FedUpAtHomeTroels - dont understand your post. The pension age wasn’t lower because anyone takes time out for babies. In any event, the person to whom child benefit gets paid is credited 12 years ni contributions even if they don’t work. I don’t fully know why you are not getting a full state pension from your post but it doesn’t seem to be anything to do with age equalization.

Actually , life expectancy for women is falling. The amount of pension is the lowest in Europe, but still women need to get what they paid in for. There is los the anomaly where men are not having to pay contributions after a certain age I believe. This is not equality. Those living abroad do not have the same possibility of claiming benefits either.

Because some women feel ok about losing money which they paid in, does not mean that all women can afford to just let it go.

Referring to the State pension system as "losing money they paid in" is really misleading.

My own state pension age has increased by 7 years since I started working, but the number of years I will receive it (in theory) has increased far more.

I’m a Waspi woman. I have no issue with equalising retirement ages but the way it was done was shocking.

It was first changed in 1996. My state pension age was deferred by just over a year at that point and I shrugged and sucked it up. However, the second change was really close to my intended retirement date and it was another three years with virtually no notice.

I have two issues with it. The first is they hit 1950s women twice. The second is that the transition arrangements were bonkers. I got my pension at 64 and three months. If I’d been born eight hours earlier, I’d have got it at 63 and nine months. They just made it up as they went along.

I’ve kind of got over it now. And that’s what’s being relied on - as we all eventually get our pensions we’ll stop caring. The bastards still treated a whole generation of women like shit though.

I can understand why younger people might think the same as you @GrimSisters. The problem is the times were so different for these women (I'm one of them) and social class played a part. Generally women weren't encouraged to go to university, or get a well paid job. They were expected to have a number of children, do all the housework, look after elderly relatives. There was no maternity pay or leave, no free childcare, no after school clubs, no mod cons, the list goes on. I'm one of the lucky ones, I was a teacher, later worked in the LEA and paid into their pensions. I was able to retire at 62 even though I was a SAHM for several years, mostly because I'm married and my husband has a great pension. Many working class women did low paid jobs, if any, that fitted around their family and had no opportunity to pay anything extra for their old age. I'm a member of several Facebook groups for these women and I really believe them when they say they didn't know the pension age had been changed - they were too busy and too tired to be reading national newspapers. I feel so sorry for those who are single and are struggling to work in low paid jobs, maybe looking after elderly parents and helping out with childcare with their DGC. Yes, we wanted equality but these women never had it and as usual the working classes are suffering the most from this badly implemented policy.

As pp have said, it's not the equalisation to 65 that was the problem, that was known about the mid 90s, it was the swift change later on with very little notice.

At the moment there is a lot of prejudice towards older women (Karen, anyone?). You don't appreciate how bad it can be until you are actually living it. It's really fucking depressing (I'm 57).

Brilliant post @talkingdeadscot Tuesday 08.48

Sorry that was today at 08.48:(wed)

This is related so I thought I would post, as it shows that the expectation of women re whether they even need to bother with a pension (my dad told my mum she shouldn't bother to pay her stamps as she would be covered by his contirbutions - what a mistake)!

" ... Currently, the government has agreed to check records for one group of women, married women whose husband's reached pension age after 17th March 2008, and whose pension should have been automatically increased when he retired.

However, Webb emphasised that there is a "larger group" of women who could be missing out on the payments.

This includes widows who were underpaid as married women and are now on the correct rate, widows who are still not getting the correct rate, and older women whose husband reached pension age before 17th March 2008 and still do not know they need to claim an uplift. ... "

www.pensionsage.com/pa/Pressure-for-govt-to-address-underpaid-womens-state-pensions-grows-as-LCP-launches-petition.php

I think that in this day and age people don’t really appreciate how non existent information was.

Even if you had heard that pensions were being altered then you couldn’t just go on google and see a newspaper report from a couple of days ago to find out more.
The information just wasn’t available.

This wasn’t that long ago.

Saying that these women were forewarned and had plenty of time to make alternative arrangements.

How were they forewarned. In a newspaper they didn’t get. Or on the tv news that they didn’t watch.

I knew about both changes because scanning the news was part of my job, I listened to Radio 4 during my commute and I’m a news hound. I quite believe the majority of women didn’t know and no letters were sent to us.

As I said, the first one was relatively minor and I was 43 so retirement felt a long way off. 2011 was another matter, I was almost 60 and faced with another wait with almost no notice. How on earth were we supposed to plan?

stated that an aunt missed deadline for 60 by a month and therefore had to wait another 5 years for pension - that could not have been the case due to the incremental monthly increases in age between April 1950 and March 1953

Perhaps it was people she was at school with rather than just her year, I've only heard her talk to them about if we've been in town and the usual awkward small talk- but either way she was shafted.

As thingybob says, it was well publicized but perhaps some women didn’t want to accept it. I don’t want to wait till 67 to retire but I accept that there needs to be a balance as universal state pensions are hugely expensive and people are living longer. Women are still paid less than men
and often end up making huge financial sacrifices for child rearing than men don’t generally make. That should be addressed but a lower state pension age is unfair and not the solution imo

But it wasnt well publicised. There wasnt the internet then. The original move to 65 even I heard about, much was made of that so much that I remember it and I was young. I agreed that the ages should be equal. Although why raise ours instead of lower mens was a mystery.
But the second shift I knew nothing about til a few years ago when the HMRC wrote to me and told me I'll be 70 before I can claim state pension. Bit harsh. And as 70 for me is some time away, will it be increased again. Will it soon be 75? 80? How long can anyone be expected to work?