A report long-awaited by campaigners, which focuses on how the decision to increase the retirement age of women born in the 1950s affected them, is set to be published on Thursday. The Office of the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman has been investigating a potential injustice resulting from the decision to raise women’s retirement age to bring it in line with men’s ages. Campaigners’ demands for compensation are based on the assertion that millions of women suffered financially as a result of the decision, and that they were not warned ahead of time of the rise in retirement age.
The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman report is the culmination of a long-running campaign dating back to changes first passed by the UK House of Commons around thirty years ago. Before those changes, for over six decades in the UK, men retired at 65 and women retired at 60. A law was passed in 1995 that set out a timetable for raising women’s retirement age so that it would equal men’s age. The original plan was to phase in those changes between 2010 and 2020, but the coalition government accelerated the shift in 2011 in an effort to reduce the cost of the state pension system to taxpayers. This meant that the new higher retirement age for women was brought forward to 2018. It was then raised again to 66 for both men and women in 2020.
Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi) has argued that women’s later-life plans and finances were harmed by the change in retirement age. If the report recommends compensation, the bill for the government could run into the billions. The ombudsman is not legally able to recommend the government reimburses women for the full amount of pensions they did not receive. However, it can recommend that at least some of those affected receive payments of £10,000 or more, although it is not yet clear how the compensation scheme would work.
According to Angela Madden, chair of Waspi, the government saved £181bn by equalising the state pension age. She supports the principle of equalising men and women’s retirement age but criticises the Department of Work and Pensions for failing to communicate the changes to women affected so that they could prepare for them. Some women born in the 1950s who were unaware of the changes to the retirement age were plunged into poverty and struggled to find work due to their age. “Some people had to sell their homes; some people had their divorce settlements worked out on a state pension age of 60,” she told BBC Breakfast. Finally, Madden has called for urgent action and said it is time for political parties to support compensation of that “order”
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