No payout for WASPI women

[ErrolTheDragon]

Fury as women hit by pension age rise denied payouts www.bbc.com/news/articles/czr36842nd6o

Wow... it hadn't occurred to me that the ombudsman report on this would just be ignored.

You’ve spectacularly missed the point but I can’t be arsed with any more of this. Happy Christmas. 🎄

Sorry, I have no idea what your point was that I missed, but I agree we're not getting anywhere with this discussion.
Happy Christmas!

This the point I made on a thread which ran some time before the announcement: all the people saying, "Why should I care about the WASPI women because I have to retire even older, at 67?" when their retirement is decades away are making a false comparison.

Your comparison @BIossomtoes (I used the same one) is the correct one: 'If someone expecting their retirement age to be 67 was suddenly told with virtually no notice it had moved to 70 I’d expect them to be miffed, wouldn’t you?'. I've yet to find anyone who's said, "Oh no, I'd be perfectly fine with that." And I wouldn't believe them if they did.

Anybody wanting to know the effects of the changes on some WASPI women should read their stories.

If someone expecting their retirement age to be 67 was suddenly told with virtually no notice it had moved to 70 I’d expect them to be miffed, wouldn’t you?

To be fair, I think the golden age of an assured static state pension age - or even the perception of that - has long passed.

You barely hear anybody still working say nowadays "When I retire at 67" without adding "of course, it'll probably have gone up again by then, or even just scrapped".

State pension expectations have been dramatically lowered across the board. Most folk are much less trusting and/or much more cynical where governments are concerned - and far less willing to just accept what they were once told/believed as immutable truth.

As OldCrone said above, the only way you could make it unequivocally 'fair' and never dash anybody's expectations would be to make changes to rules that wouldn't affect anybody who had already entered the workplace; or even who had already been born.

It's a lovely idea, but totally unworkable to expect plans to be made 50-70 years in advance - by politicians who would be long retired (and quite probably dead) by the time whoever was in charge by then was allowed to implement what they'd guaranteed five to seven decades earlier.

@FizzyBisto You seem to have set up a straw man.

State pension expectations have been dramatically lowered across the board. Most folk are much less trusting and/or much more cynical where governments are concerned - and far less willing to just accept what they were once told/believed as immutable truth.

And why is that, I wonder? Could that possibly be because of the Waspis’ treatment?

It's across the board of government decisions for a number of years. Certainly less deference to say Doctors , when 50 years ago their word was gospel. Not everything is through the lense of Waspi, though I can see why that might be for some.

Nobody said it was. We’re discussing pensions, not doctors’ God complexes.

The previous deference to professionals and governments and the fall of it, is linked to societies expectations of pensions, it was in comment to FizzyBisto post.

More to do with the borrowing/debt we are in, together with Austerity and increases in state pension age & not least because the Tories have stated they want NI gone.

I really struggle with the Waspi womens cause, they seem to think that because their PA was levelled up to that of men, despite a better life expectancy, they should be compensated for this.. as a group... i get it with those specifically disadvantaged but thats a much smaller number.

Its crazy to think this country has £10.5 billion spare, when people are doing their dental treatments at home, emg ambulances can take hours to get to a stroke patient and 7.6m on waiting lists.

Not intending to - just responding to one specific point.

I agree with your last paragraph but the middle one shows lack of understanding of the WASPI complaint. At no time has equalisation of pension age with men been the issue, the principle is broadly agreed to be correct, it’s the process that’s flawed.

May well be partially - but I think it goes across the board; by no means just limited to state pensions.

I should have read the very next reply before responding to the one where my post was quoted!

I understood that it wasn't even the process, but that the communication was inadequate. The ombudsman found this to be the case.

My understanding is that there was nothing wrong with the process, and that the changes were made according to the rules, so there was nothing wrong with the changes themselves or even the timescales (this applied to the 2011 changes as well as the 1995 changes).

The complaint which was upheld was that some of the women affected didn't get a personal letter explaining how this would affect them, or didn't get this letter early enough. Of course the women who were paying attention, reading the financial pages and planning their financial future (or even who had husbands doing this on their behalf), were well aware of the changes in good time, since the information was out there, just not sent personally through the letter box of every woman affected.

It was the process after the 2011 changes. It was madness. It was as if a bunch of civil servants had gone down the pub at lunch time and concocted it on their return. Disparate retirement ages with cliff edges at every stage when they could have just worked out the average age of those women and made that the pension date for all of them.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/state-pension-age-timetable/state-pension-age-timetable

The Pensions Act 2011 brought forward the timetable for increasing women’s State Pension age to 65, and for increasing men and women’s State Pension age to 66.

If it was about poor communication of the Act, surely men and younger women would be equally uneducated about their pension age increasing to 66?

Yes, I was surprised by the ombudsman's ruling. I'm only slightly younger than the WASPIs by a year or two, and I've never received a letter from the pension service telling me what my pension age would be. DH (born late 50s) didn't receive anything before his 65th birthday to say his pension age would be 66 instead of 65. I think he got a letter from them shortly before his 66th birthday.

Not even just the financial pages; the tabloids (and equivalent media) have been having splash front-page headlines about it for ages.

Not hard for people to see it (even if just on the news stand in the shops) or to talk to people who mention it.

Word spreads fast about so many silly and trivial things; surely people don't just find out about something that will massively affect their future financial position and keep resolutely shtum about it?

I wonder if one result of this will be that, instead of diligently sending letters to everybody affected by changes of government policy, the authorities will go the other way and stop sending any personal communications at all - with the official policy being to have regular adverts on TV/social media/other media with a website (and maybe a phone number) and just telling folk to check their situation themselves.

What do you mean “diligently*

I’ve heard bugger all from the government regarding my pension apart from one letter to say pension age was changing to 63

Aploogues, I chose the wrong word there. I meant theoretically diligently - and often failing, which is kind of how the ombudsman ruling all came about.

I'm just saying that, rather than trying harder and aiming (and failing) to cover all bases, they may just not even try in the first place, as their official policy, and tell you to go to their website and/or speak to an IFA.

Can you explain what you mean here?

The timescale for women born in 1953 under the 2011 Act looks to me just like an accelerated version of the original 1995 changes, with 4 month increments instead of 2.

What do you mean by "they could have just worked out the average age of those women and made that the pension date for all of them."? And what are the "cliff edges" you're referring to? Sorry if these seem like stupid questions, but I really don't understand what you're saying here.

I think they've done that already. Has anyone younger than the WASPIs, or any men, ever received a letter about their pension age being changed?

I’m a real life example of the cliff edge. I was born on 6 August, someone born on the 5th, ie the day before, got their pension four months before me. If you look at the 2011 chart the pension ages are higher the later you were born. It was really unfair.