WASPI

I didn’t get a letter

I think it would be helpful if people could give a rough indication of how much pension time they lost with this revised state pension age - then we might be able to see if I'm correct in my suspicion the Government started by sending letters to those with the greatest loss - but gave up part way through that age range. Might shut things up all round of "You musta got a letter - I got one - so you must have" - which is what, I think, the Government were aiming for that comment to become widespread.

I lost nearly 3 years of mine of my State Pension - and I didnt get that letter.

Is there anyone who lost say 4 years or 5 years worth and they didnt get a letter on the one hand? Or people who lost a much smaller amount (eg just a few months) and they DID get a letter on the other hand?

I lost 6 years. Born 1954. No letter.

If you saw your pension date changed by less than three years then presumably you were born before 6 April 1953.

The table is here:

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

Only women born after 5 April 1953 were affected by the Pensions Act 2011.

The PHSO reported:

206. DWP’s initial complaint responses included that between April 2009 and March 2011 it had written to all women affected by the 1995 Pensions Act. It subsequently clarified that it only wrote to women born between 6 April 1950 and 5 April 1953, and that it wrote to those also affected by the 2011 Pensions Act changes between January 2012 and November 2013. DWP has accepted its initial response was not accurate.

The Pensions Act 2011 accelerated the increase in the State Pension age to 66.

www.ombudsman.org.uk/sites/default/files/Women%E2%80%99s-State-Pension-age-our-findings-on-injustice-and-associated-issues.pdf

I really do urge people to read the PHSO reports before resorting to speculation.

The main point of the five year PHSO investigation was to look at what should have happened and what did happen.

Here is the 2021 report:

www.ombudsman.org.uk/publications/womens-state-pension-age-our-findings-department-work-and-pensions-communication/background-relating-changes-state-pension-age-women

Here is the 2024 report which includes at Annex C: Summary of the levels of injustice and ranges of compensation in our severity of injustice scale

www.ombudsman.org.uk/sites/default/files/Women%E2%80%99s-State-Pension-age-our-findings-on-injustice-and-associated-issues.pdf

As I wrote upthread, in 2007, when the DWP finally accepted that they needed to write to women individually, there were no plans to tell women born after May 1955 about how the Pensions Act 1995 affected them. From the first PHSO report:

114. The proposed schedule for issuing letters included women who turned 60 between April 2010 and May 2015. We have seen no evidence of what – if anything – DWP proposed to do to tell women who turned 60 after May 2015 (whose State Pension age had increased to 65 under the 1995 Act) at this stage.

I could not retire until I was 66. I worked the extra years so I could get my occ pen along with my state pension. I wanted a comfortable life in retiring. I found it difficult but manageable, the job was stressful.
I can't remember to be fair if I got a letter, but working the extra six years was not easy.

I received my letter but it was only 18months before my due retirement date. If I am honest as I was intending to continue working I didn’t complain. However if I was planning to retire I would t have been very happy

Just in.. "The Government has reconsidered the case after a new document came to light, but has again concluded no compensation should be paid."
Feel for those ladies who were not aware, I had a letter so I was aware.

Didn’t affect me, born in 64. Eligible for mine at 67. Not holding my breath, tbh. I very much doubt that state pensions will exist at all by the time our adult kids are of state pension age.

Did being aware make a difference, Visgirl? I don’t think it did for me. I couldn’t pay into an occupational pension for many years, as my contract was renewed annually, and private pensions were far less common back then.

IMO the difference between the retirement ages went some way to compensate for that (and the numerous other ways in which women were discriminated against).still, if they had changed their minds the government would be accused of ‘flip flopping’ or U turning, or another media cliche. It’s disappointing but not surprising.

Graphite - Yep...indeed I was born earlier than April 1953.

Guessing that I'm in a very specific agegroup then that didnt get sent our letters.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1jeyn3yxn9o

This could be why governments of whatever stripe find it hard to manage the economy.

DWP’s own commissioned surveys showed that by 2007, just three years before the change, 57% of women were not aware of their altered SP age.

That isn’t the "vast majority knew" even for the most arithmetically-challenged Minister. And at the risk of labouring the point, being aware of a general change isn't the same as knowing how something affects the individual. When the changes meant that some women waited a month and some six years for their pension, how could it?

The amount the Tories under Duncan Smith saved by accelerating the changes brought about by the Pensions Act 2011 is about the same amount of excess funds sitting in the National Insuarance Fund. That's our NIC being used to service government debt and earning over £4 billion a year. That money could easily be used to pay a blanket sum of compensation as a goodwill gesture. £500 would cost just £1.9 billion. £1,000 would cost £3.8 billion.

It wouldn’t satisfy everyone and wouldn't be entirely fair but it would be in approximate line with Level 3 justice. Anyone thinking they fall within Level 4 or higher (and it can’t be that many) would have to make a special case.

The positive PR for a Labour mea culpa - settling something they were largely responsible for and the Tories refused to do - would be huge and go a long way towards repairing the damage done by the WFP debacle.

Doodledog..... I was OK as I worked in the NHS so had a NHS final salary pension, which I took at 60 but I was asked to carried on working. I went onto the Hospital Bank luckily on the grade I retired on.
I only fully retired last April at 70. I know I was personally very lucky, which is why I feel for those ladies.

Thanks for replying Visgirl

I wasn't able to do anything about it, as I wasn't in a position to pay more into a pension - I wasn't allowed to pay in at all. It's easy to forget how times change - these days you can go online and buy AVCs or various other pension products, but it wasn't the same in the past.

Luckily for me, my husband has a good pension and is happy to share it. I do have one of my own, but it is about a third of what it would have been had I been able to pay in when I started working in education. I was full-time for most of that, and only changed institutions once (moving from FE to HE with the same pension provider) but the fact that my contracts were renewable meant is wasn't possible until the EU rules forced the hand of the government of the day and allows all employees to contribute to workplace pensions.

I didn’t get a letter but knew about it from You and Yours on radio 4. I told my job share partner who didn’t know about it. She was older than me so retired at 60.

But hey - someone has to make the financial sacrifices necessary so that our magnificent government can throw freebies and hotel accommodation at asylum seekers, increasing numbers of which are appearing in court accused of serious sexual assault.

Graphite - I didnt know about that - ie that the Government had done that survey just 3 years before Impact Time.

Makes one wonder just why they did that survey - given that the result of it indicated the majority of affected people didn't know and yet I don't see any sign that the Government thought "Quick - we'll have to rectify that. Send out letters all round and/or have a big advert campaign to tell people".

Given that it was such a shock to the system to be put in that position even for those of us that knew - then I can only imagine what it felt like to those who didnt find out until just before they were due to retire (they thought). That must have been one heck of a shock to the system!! Imagine thinking "Right - I'm going to start in next year on all the stuff I've been waiting to have time for. Thank goodness I can retire now" only to find you couldnt. Some people must have only realised with weeks to go that this applied. There must have been people trying unsuccessfully to retract their notice I'm sure.

From memory - I think I had to give three months notice I was going to retire and the thought of handing that notice in only to find I couldnt after all would have turned my hair grey at that time. Especially given some of us (which I'm sure included me) would literally not have been allowed to retract our notice by the employer.

Cariad. If you read the PHSO report you will see what happened next. I have already referred to this upthread.

DWP did the survey to see whether, three years on from the 2004 survey. which showed only 43% of women knew their new SPA, anything had changed. It hadn't.

116. An internal DWP memo from April 2007 described the 2007 research findings as ‘depressing reading’. The memo reflects on the lack of progress since 2004 and the prospect of future complaints from women. It states:

‘You floated the idea of contacting the Ombudsman to get a feel for how she would react to claims from women saying they had never been told or were not aware that state pension age is increasing. In the light of the lack of upward movement from our 43% base figure from 3 years ago, we suggest putting this off until we can explain our strategy from here to get the message over. If we go now, we face being painted into a corner. Despite a really strong defensive brief, we still have 50% “ignorance levels” with three years to go. [The Ombudsman’s] first question will be what are you proposing to do about it?’

123. DWP has told us that direct mailing required planning and 2009 was the earliest possible start date. It explained it needed to engage with suppliers to get detailed costings on the preferred option, which involved working with private companies and ‘relatively new’ IT systems. It also says due diligence was needed because of the significant sums of public money involved. Even now, with modern IT, DWP says, a mailing would have a lead in time of months rather than weeks.

124. DWP used its CIS database to identify women to write to. It told us CIS went live in March 2005, was piloted for the first year, and enhancements were made between April 2005 and June 2008 to make it a more comprehensive source of customer data. It said that citizen data was not robust before the introduction of CIS, and this only gradually changed once CIS was introduced. It told us that, given CIS was continually improving, ‘it would have been strongly preferable not to conduct a mail-out at least prior to 2008’.

The first letters were sent in April 2009.

Absolutely, Cariad. Whether or not women could make a difference to their pensions (vanishingly unlikely in most cases I would have thought) the crashing disappointment and irreversible changes to their working lives devastated countless women. Many had to take whatever work they could get, which was, of course, limited as they were 60 and deemed too old, and ended up doing things like cleaning and care work which can be very hard on an older body.

When people say 'oh, but you wanted equality and now complain when you've got it' I feel furious. We didn't have equality in the first place. As legislation changed to the point where men and women are not treated differently in law, there could have been very small incremental shifts towards making the SPA the same as for men - but in the form of an extra month at a time, not extra years - and there should have been an information campaign that was impossible to miss.

Lack of knowledge of the Law is no excuse.
I do not believe all these woman had no knowledge of pension changes when it was in all the newspapers, on television and radio, notice boards in workplaces, with access to advice about pension and retirement given regularly. Apparently none of them bothered to ascertain when they could/would retire and what their pension would be.
But so much easier to plead ignorance and tout for sympathy, or rather, compensation.

I got notice and there was plenty of other communication about it. Frankly I’m fed up to the back teeth of the WASPIs.

Well aren't you the lucky (smug) one!

https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/202601/medium-5s86jk-screenshot-20260129-153407-samsung-internet.jpg https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/202601/medium-cy2xsu-screenshot-20241206-075849-x.jpg

To hear the latest govt update (that govt whose members signed pieces of paper of support for WASPI)
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002qj8r
20 minutes into programme

To those posters who talk about all the publicity in 1990s, many women, who were affected, were working full-time with a couple of primary-age children. They weren't reading women's magazines or sitting down at 10pm to watch the News, they were sorting the washing or packing lunch boxes. They were exhausted. They may have known (eventually) that pension age was rising , but they needed a personal letter in 1995 with the date they were to retire. And that date should have been stuck to. That was the maladministration, not tinkered about with by Osborne

I was born in 1958 , I don’t recall receiving a letter but as I worked in the NHS I was informed by them.
Just heard on the news , today’s decision by the government has been to reject Waspis claim again 😢

No letter for me.

I had a letter in the late 90’s or early 2000’s saying my pension age would be 63, I was born in 1959. No other letter. We don’t have a newspaper but do watch the news , so I wasn’t expecting to retire at 60- but still an unpleasant shock to realise I would have to wait until I was 66.
I get very fed up of younger generations telling me that older women (in particular those born in the early 50’s) should somehow have known what to expect and provided themselves with a private pension. For many there simply was no access to any other form of pension, other than the state pension.