I’m on holiday in
Dundee as I write this, staying with Anne Park who, friends will remember, used
to live in Whitstable.
Anne is 62 years
old and angry.
“At the age of 57,”
she says, “it was ordained by the powers-that-be that I wasn’t going to be able
to retire at 60, as I’d been promised, but I was going to have to wait till I
was 66.”
That’s six years
stolen from her. Six years she’d dreamed about and planned for. Six years of
her life that she will never be able to get back.
It was such short
notice that it only gave her three years to make any kind of an alternative plan.
As a consequence she was forced to sell her three bedroom house in order to
downsize, in order to pay off her mortgage.
She’s been fiddled
twice over. “Not only have I had six years’ worth of pension stolen from me,
but I’m expected to pay six years’ worth of National Insurance that I wouldn’t
previously have paid, which will make no difference whatsoever to the final
figure as it currently stands.”
In other words,
she’s already paid enough National Insurance to get the full pension; it’s just
that she’s not allowed to gain access to it.
I’m sure that Anne
is not the only woman reading this who has been subjected to this injustice.
According to the Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI)
campaign website, 3.8 million women have been affected by the lack of notice.
It’s not that the WASPI women are
arguing that the retirement age should have remained unequal, with men
continuing to retire five years later than women: it’s just that, they say,
proper notice should have been given, or compensation offered to those women
who, through no fault of their own, have found their retirement plans seriously
undermined by the changes.
Even the Department
for Work and Pensions (DWP) website itself says that it should give
ten years notice of changes in relation to State Pension.
The WASPI campaign
was set up in 2015 by five ordinary women incensed at the injustice. They say
that their aim is “to achieve fair transitional state pension arrangements for
all women born in the 50s affected by the State Pension law (1995/2011 Acts).”
Their website
includes template letters you can use to send to
the DWP in order to underline their claim that there has been maladministration
in the implementation of these laws.
Every women
affected by these changes should make it her business to send off one of these
letters, to get involved in the campaign, and to make sure that the government
is held to account for its duplicity in relation to its own citizens.
There’s always
enough money for wars, royal weddings, and MPs expenses, it seems; never enough
for the needs of ordinary people going about their ordinary lives.
Indeed, the civil
servant responsible for the increase to the retirement age to 67, Sir Robert Devereaux, is retiring at the age of 61
with a £1.8 million pension pot. He will receive £85,000 a year, and a lump sum
of £245,000.
What this case does
is to highlight how easy it is for the government to break the social contract
between the state and its citizens. Most women born in the 50s grew up
expecting to retire at 60, but by a couple of swift strokes of the pen, as it
were, and a little parliamentary debate, they have been deprived of that
promise.
What other
expectations might be stolen from us in future? Democracy itself could be at
risk.
Waspi Facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/WaspiCampaign/
from https://christopherjamesstone.wordpress.com/2018/09/07/waspi-women/
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