Higher and Lower rate of State Pension,. This really needs changing

If you want more money, go out and work for it.
All these folks taking years out to raise kids and now moaning because whilst they sat around doing nothing , some of us took 2 weeks off after giving birth then back to work.
You reap what you sow.

Cumbrian123, yes I did take a year off with my first child. In the days I am talking about it was not done, frowned upon even, to work with a young child. In fact, when I applied to do a PGCE the first college I applied to wouldn’t even consider my application because I had a child and actually wrote this to me. Fortunately, not all colleges were the same and I eventually found a suitable one. I am just saying it was not quite the same situation in those days. Perhaps you are younger than me!

It was expected that women gave in their notice in late pregnancy. There was no maternity leave, pay and no return to your job. No nurseries to look after children if they were able to get another job and grandparents did not generally help with childcare.
There was little choice in the matter.
,

Bringing up children rarely involves “sitting around doing nothing”. You’re quite right Cumbrian, you reap what you sow, in childcare perhaps more than in many other activities.

Who has said ‘lazy’, ‘feckless’ or ‘self-indulgent’?

It’s not a moral issue- a pension is a contribution-based thing. Don’t you think that someone who paid in for nine years more than someone else should get more back? What is the point of paying in if not?

silverlining48

It was expected that women gave in their notice in late pregnancy. There was no maternity leave, pay and no return to your job. No nurseries to look after children if they were able to get another job and grandparents did not generally help with childcare.
There was little choice in the matter.
,

All true silverlining
Grandparents hundreds of miles away or else working themselves, no nurseries. It was a different word then.

sat around doing nothing very rude, CumbrianNan

In fact, it's so easy to go out to work and leave the hard work of looking after children to someone else.

Nandalot

*Cumbrian123*, yes I did take a year off with my first child. In the days I am talking about it was not done, frowned upon even, to work with a young child. In fact, when I applied to do a PGCE the first college I applied to wouldn’t even consider my application because I had a child and actually wrote this to me. Fortunately, not all colleges were the same and I eventually found a suitable one. I am just saying it was not quite the same situation in those days. Perhaps you are younger than me!

Perhaps you are younger than me!

I have a feeling that many on here may be much younger than some of us Nandalot and the world we inhabited then is beyond their comprehension. I really can't imagine leaving a two week old baby in a nursery in order to go back to work.
Perhaps some people didn't move far from their homes, either and had help.

Some of us spent time in school as volunteers, too, of course, and we had to perch our backsides on those tiny chairs as we helped children with their reading, craft etc. before I went back to college then work as soon as I was able to.

Whatever happened to the Sisterhood 😂

Doodledog

Who has said ‘lazy’, ‘feckless’ or ‘self-indulgent’?

It’s not a moral issue- a pension is a contribution-based thing. Don’t you think that someone who paid in for nine years more than someone else should get more back? What is the point of paying in if not?

Someone who paid in for 3 years more than me will get about £65 a week more.

I smile at some of these comments and the lack of historical knowledge. I worked for the government and had to resign as married women were not employed. I then brought up three children working part time to fit in with childcare duties.

Because I worked part time I just paid the married women stamp which does not contribute towards pension. My state pension is low and no occupational pension because pt workers were not allowed to join pension schemes in the jobs I did.

When the children were older I worked full time but never had the chance to build up a pension as OH job meant we moved every three years. We all have different stories and have often worked as second class employees because of gender.

Again, it’s not a moral issue. Well, maybe expecting others to pay for the society you live in has a moral element, but as far as pensions are concerned it’s straightforward. You pay in and you take out. If you don’t pay for nine years, you lose nine years worth of pension. If you paid a lower stamp you get a lower pension.

It’s made complicated because of contracting out, and because the SPA changed, as did the ability to pay into SERPS and claim widows’ pensions, so women who have paid every year they could still get different amounts paid at different ages. It will even out eventually but in the meantime there are casualties. They could have been predicted and mitigations put in place, but weren’t. If this had happened to men’s pensions I wonder if more would have been done but we’ll never know.

Well, maybe expecting others to pay for the society you live in has a moral element

That is an attack on those women who found that staying at home and bringing up their own children was really the only viable option at that time.
Just because they were not out at work for however many years, earning money and paying a stamp, does not mean they were not making a valuable contribution to society in many ways.

Gin
As I didn't achieve the 39 years required for a full old State Pension, I don't expect one and am not complaining about that, but some of the comments on here do show an absolute lack of understanding of how things were then for married women before and after they had a family and in fact a disregard for the contributions they may have made to society in general (unpaid).

Were men ever asked about childcare arrangements when they went for a job interview? Of course not.

As I keep saying, pensions are a simple transaction. If you pay in you get out. It doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do to contribute to society as pensions are based on contributions. Also - working parents can make other contributions to society too, as well as working, bringing up children and running homes.

I am not attacking anyone. I do believe that people can choose how to live their lives but not that they should be able to expect others to pay for those choices.

Looking after a baby is one thing, but when children are at school there is no reason why parents can’t work. If they choose not to they can’t expect to get the same pension as those who do.

What I am asking is what people thought would be the result of taking time out of paying contributions or paying a lower stamp, and why they seem surprised that it is a lower pension than someone who paid more in? How was the married woman’s stamp ‘sold’ to people? Why wasn’t it obvious that it would result in a lower pension? These are genuine questions, not attacks.

No-one is surprised.
What is surprising on a site primarily aimed at older women is the disparaging comments and insinuations made about women who, through choice or otherwise, stayed at home for a number of years to bring up their own children.

Allira

No-one is surprised.
What is surprising on a site primarily aimed at older women is the disparaging comments and insinuations made about women who, through choice or otherwise, stayed at home for a number of years to bring up their own children.

But that’s not surprising either.
And some of the people, on the old pension had no option because grand parents were not around to pick up the childcare duties. Getting a job then having to take time off because your child, despite vaccination, had whooping cough, or measles or anything else that made them unwelcome outside your home, and when grandparents either lived too far away or were unwilling added to the difficulties. Taking time off was unpopular with employers.
Do you remember the days when you could be asked at interview, about your children or your plans for future children, or even how long you’d been married?
Getting a job where travel took up (or even now does take up) a large chunk of what was earned, together with before and after school care, which ate even more didn’t leave much for paying into an additional pension.
But hey, let’s support this government’s actions at all costs. So many of these poorer pensioners won’t be around at the next election, so why should they care? Sadly, many of these pensioners are also on the lower rate, so already £200pm worse off.
And actually, I’d like to know;
there are so many pensioners pouring out of the woodwork now who keep telling us they didn’t need the WFA, so why didn’t they refuse to accept it and make it available to those who need it instead of waiting to be told they don’t need it?

Perhaps some posters should check before they post. I was a teacher. I had to hand in my notice at the end of the Christmas term as my baby was due at the beginning of March. There was no choice as you most definitely couldn't go on maternity leave .After she was born I could not go back to work as my mother looked after her shop and there were no good nurseries. I was able later to do some evening class work and when she was 3 I started working part time. She was born in 1963. Things have changed a lot.Perhaps the fact that when I started teaching I earned about £48 a month might make some think .

additional state pension and serps go up with inflation and not triple lock, hence the gap between old and new state pensions is continuing to get wider. I believe we, on the old state pension, will get overall around 10p a day extra. Certainly not the amount touted by the labour government

Do you remember the days when you could be asked at interview, about your children or your plans for future children, or even how long you’d been married?

I was turned down for a job once because I was asked at interview how long I'd been married, when I said six months I was told I hadn't got the job because I'd probably be getting pregnant before long! That, of course, was a male interviewer.
In fact it was several years before that happy event occurred.

Reading all these posts makes me think that there should be more education on pensions. Perhaps there should be the opportunity for a pension screening, rather like the health screening on offer.
A bit late for some, but this thread indicates that many, unwittingly expected their retirement provision to be different.

Allira

No-one is surprised.
What is surprising on a site primarily aimed at older women is the disparaging comments and insinuations made about women who, through choice or otherwise, stayed at home for a number of years to bring up their own children.

I am not disparaging anyone. I am pointing out that pensions are a financial transaction and asking who you (and others) think should pay to give you a choice to stay at home for years? It's not just the pension - it's all the unpaid tax and so on that pays for all the things we all get, whether we pay towards them or not.

I think there are a lot of good points on this thread though - one size never fits all, and too many people are missing out who I’m sure were not intended to.

But. In threads where IHT is discussed, people are horrified that their heirs might be taxed on a windfall they (the heirs) haven’t earned. We are told that billionaires will leave the country if they are asked to pay more in tax.

We have lots of posts from people admitting that they didn’t pay fully into the pension scheme (ie the married woman's contribution) but complaining that they get less than those who did. Why wouldn't they? I don't think that those on the old pension have necessarily missed out, but equally, having had a pension for 6 years longer than those on the new one won't pay the bills today. I will claim my pension as soon as I'm able, and can't blame others for doing the same at 60.

We regularly have posts from those going on glamorous holidays and having home improvements or other big expenses, for whom the WFP can only be a nice gift rather than a lifeline, yet also complaining that the payment has been cut. IMO it is only fair that we should be able to spend our own money on making our homes comfortable and enjoying our retirement, but if we are doing that can we honestly claim to need help with the bills?

At the same time we know that children are going hungry, that the NHS is struggling, that services are being cut and that life is hard for people of all ages. But when the talk is of working-age benefits, few people on here are in favour of increasing them, and cite women getting their nails done or having phones as reasons why not, and we are told that they just need to learn to budget or batch cook.

What is the fairest way to plug these gaps? If we means-test, older people with occupational pensions or part-time jobs lose out to those without. Is it fair to penalise them for planning for retirement? Occupational pensions are not free. Young people in two-income families lose out to those where one chooses not to work. Someone who has worked for a promotion can find that the extra money lifts them above the threshold so misses out. It goes on and on.

If we have universal payments instead, they have to be smaller (to cover more people) and they sometimes go to those who can manage without, but sometimes only because of having the small pensions mentioned above, and round and round it goes.

If we pay things like WFP to everyone with less than £X in savings or £Y in income, is that fair to those who have already done without things in order to accrue those savings, and if we pay things like Child Benefit on the same basis will it stop people from doing more in order to earn a higher standard of living? And why shouldn't we all be able to use our own money for a 'rainy day fund' in case of accident or emergency, without it counting against us?

It’s like unraveling a ball of tangled yarn and they are just some of the anomalies.

I think the WFP has been handled badly. But I don’t think it is an attack on pensioners. It is an attempt to make things fairer across the board, which is all but impossible for the reasons above.

karmalady

additional state pension and serps go up with inflation and not triple lock, hence the gap between old and new state pensions is continuing to get wider. I believe we, on the old state pension, will get overall around 10p a day extra. Certainly not the amount touted by the labour government

How do you work that out? Pensions are likely to increase by 4% from April 2025. Do you only receive £2.50 a day in state pension?

Fantastic post!

Fantastic post! Agree with the sentiments expressed.

Sorry. I thought my comments would appear under the post I was commenting about! Mt comment was meant for the last post by Doodledog.

It is a pity there is no delete or edit function on this forum. I am embarrassed by my errors and spelling mistakes lol!