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ROS ALTMANN: There should be a relief fund for the Waspi women who suffered the most

ROS ALTMANN: There should be a relief fund for the Waspi women who suffered the most

Ros Altmann is a former pensions minister who now sits in the House of Lords.

The government has disappointed millions of “Waspi” women by refusing to pay them anything, despite the parliamentary ombudsman’s finding of maladministration in the way the state’s changes to the retirement age were communicated.

Many of these women, aged between 65 and 70, are in serious difficulties and I would have liked to see them helped.

But since the government also scrapped winter fuel payments without notice, it’s clear that retirees are no longer a priority.

The Women Against State Pension Inequality or Waspi campaign has been trying for years to get compensation for women born in the 1950s.

They believe they were treated unfairly when the legal retirement age was increased from 60 to 65, then to 66, without sufficient notice.

Lady Altmann: When I was Pensions Minister, I tried to persuade my fellow ministers to establish a welfare program to which women most affected would be eligible.

After the BackTo60 group lost a court case which claimed the women were being discriminated against, the Waspi campaign’s appeal to the Parliamentary Ombudsman for maladministration was pursued and ultimately succeeded in their favor.

The Ombudsman’s March report recommended possible compensation of between £1,000 and £2,950 each, to compensate for the maladministration that occurred during 2005, although most of the women did not suffer direct financial loss.

I never believed that this recommendation was likely to come to pass, as it would cost between £3.5 billion and £10.5 billion.

The government says it cannot afford to pay billions of pounds to women to compensate for the rise in the pension age.

So he won’t pay any of them a penny to acknowledge the problems.

After the Chancellor’s terrible decision to scrap winter fuel payments for almost all pensioners, including the poorest who don’t benefit from pension credits, it’s clear there is little sympathy for pensioners , which simply do not constitute a priority in public spending.

The Parliamentary Ombudsman suspected that the government would reject his report.

He took the unusual step of laying it directly in Parliament, because the Department for Work and Pensions never admitted he had done anything serious or even apologized, let alone offered any compensation.

He was right to believe that his recommendations would provoke resistance.

I have never been in favor of compensating every Waspi woman, but I still believe that a relief fund or early access to retirement credit would have been a good thing.

This is because I know this issue was handled terribly by the DWP between 2004 and 2009.

When I was Pensions Minister, I tried to persuade my fellow ministers in 2015-16 to recognize that there had been poor administration and to establish some sort of financial assistance program to which women most affected could claim.

I also suggested that early access to pension credit was a possible route to means-tested support. But there was no support for it.

I am a Waspi woman and I would not want the taxpayers to compensate me personally because I knew it.

But many clearly did not know this and, therefore, I believe there is a strong moral case for the most affected women, who have suffered serious hardship, to be able to make a claim on a case-by-case basis. Unfortunately, this measure was also rejected by the government.

In its response to the Ombudsman, the government attempts to justify denying compensation to anyone by citing a survey which shows that around three-quarters of women aged 45 to 54 in 2004 knew their retirement age was going to be noted.

But that still means a quarter didn’t do it and they weren’t informed immediately.

The initial increases were passed by Parliament in 1995, proposing to raise the retirement age for women from 60 to 65, between 2010 and 2020.

The stated intention was to give at least 15 years’ notice so that affected women could plan ahead.

This would have been fair enough, but unfortunately the women were not properly informed about this important change in their future lives.

Even after 2004, when DWP surveys showed that so many women were unaware of the changes, there was no urgent communications campaign to inform them.

Indeed, letters were written to tell them how much they could receive from their state pension, without telling them that they would receive nothing at 60.

As the second increase in the state’s retirement age came before Parliament in 2011, I campaigned to slow the changes.

But unfortunately the increase in the state pension for women at 65, and for men and women at 66, were both brought forward to 2018 and 2020 respectively, so they ultimately happened suddenly. instantly.

Some women who stopped working because they hoped to receive their pension at age 60 have been hit hard.

Raising the state retirement age: The Women Against State Pension Inequality campaign has been trying for years to get compensation for women born in the 1950s.

Women wrote to me to explain how they had made careful plans, giving up their jobs to care for their loved ones, calculating that their savings could last them until state retirement age.

They said they would be short of money if the age was raised at such short notice and that they could not return to work now, but could have continued working at that time if they had known it.

The state pension is crucial for many women born in the 1950s.

They often had little chance of building up a private pension and if they worked part-time after having children, they were not even allowed to join their employer’s pension scheme.

By not receiving the state pension they were counting on, many were plunged into poverty.

It is difficult to see a way out in the future for the Waspi women. Many of them are sick and were hoping for better care.

One solution would be for MPs to insist that they are not happy with this decision – and I don’t see that happening!

The only other solution might be for someone who is in serious difficulty and who would have been able to make different decisions to protect their finances if they had known they would not receive their state pension from 60 years, to launch a judicial review of the government’s response. .

Without either of these, I fear none of these women will achieve anything.

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