WASPI ‘victory’

Pollycat

ProDave said:

I must be missing something here.  There were a lot of years between the change in state pension age being announced and it actually happening.

The gist of what we are seeing on the news was people were not notified directly by letter and must have lived in a bubble with never watching any news and it came as a shock to them at the last minute when they suddenly found they had another 5 years to wait before they got their state pension.  Is that a fair summary?

If the "case" is just that they have to wait another 5 years, then surely I have a "case" as well.  Most of my working life I was told I would get my state pension at 65, now I find it is 67 and that is only if they don't increase it again before I reach 67.  But nobody has written to me individually to tell me that.

And that is the point that non-WASPI supporters make.

Maybe WASPI women expected a personal visit to be advised of the change.
One women who was part of the test court case said she'd not received a letter telling her of the later change and then produced said letter in court.

michaels

Presumably the WASPI ladies all drive without wearing a seatbelt, use their mobiles while driving and don't use car seats for their grandchildren as these are all changes to the law introduced after they started to drive and of which they were not personally informed?

michaels

Silvertabby said:

Marcon said:

michaels said:

I think counting employers and employee NI I have probable paid somewhere between 300k and 400k - due to being shafted due to the change in SERPS/S2P I will only get the same new state pension as everyone else.  Not sure whether that would buy me an 11k fully indexed annuity at 67.

You are under transitional provisions, so the change in SERPS/S2P shouldn't have a negative impact on your state pension. See https://www.ageuk.org.uk/information-advice/money-legal/pensions/state-pension/new-state-pension/ and scroll down to 'How is my pension amount worked out?'.

Depending on age, people like michaels are the losers under the new pension scheme.

High earners who were not contracted out could accrue large amounts of SERPS/SP2, taking them up to a maximum State pension of over £330 per week.  More if they then deferred payment under the old rules of 10% per year.

In michaels case, all SERPS/SP2 accrued up to April 2016 is protected, but he didn't accrue any more after that despite continuing to pay the same high levels of NI.

It wasn't protected in any real sense as at the changeover point my standard plus serps/s2p contributions put me almost exactly at the new full stat pension level so all the NI paid since then has not increased my entitlement any further so effectively those SERPS/s2p payments have been confiscated.

You lose some, you lose some.

On the other hand I don't think I ever got a personally addressed letter spelling out how much worse off I would be at retirement under the new scheme so I just need to claim ignorance and get the BBC to campaign on my behalf....

Grumpy_chap

ProDave said:

I must be missing something here.  There were a lot of years between the change in state pension age being announced and it actually happening.

The gist of what we are seeing on the news was people were not notified directly by letter and must have lived in a bubble with never watching any news and it came as a shock to them at the last minute when they suddenly found they had another 5 years to wait before they got their state pension.  Is that a fair summary?

If the "case" is just that they have to wait another 5 years, then surely I have a "case" as well.  Most of my working life I was told I would get my state pension at 65, now I find it is 67 and that is only if they don't increase it again before I reach 67.  But nobody has written to me individually to tell me that.

There is also quite probably a big case of "be careful what you wish for" in the SP changes.

These WASPI women (born in 1950's) are the same class of women who campaigned while I was a child for equality.  The campaigners knew that retirement (SP) age was a potential negative, hence there was a campaign during the 1980's that retirement (SP) age was equalised to 60 for all.

That naiveness does not seem to have gone away even after all these years.

ex-pat_scot

My NI on salary around the £100k mark (after whopping pension contributions, to keep out of the high marginal tax rate) is around £6,400 pa.
At 35 years of this it would give c£225,000 total NI contributions. This is rather unrealistic, but serves to show how modest even a high earner's contributions are, when set against the broad equivalent annuity cost of the SP at around £250,000 and also the other notional social benefits such as NHS, welfare etc.
(My actual NI contributions to date are not much more than £100,000 for 33 full years of contribution and a few partial years - I wasn't a v high earner until later in my career).

Flugelhorn

ex-pat_scot said:

My NI on salary around the £100k mark (after whopping pension contributions, to keep out of the high marginal tax rate) is around £6,400 pa.
At 35 years of this it would give c£225,000 total NI contributions. This is rather unrealistic, but serves to show how modest even a high earner's contributions are, when set against the broad equivalent annuity cost of the SP at around £250,000 and also the other notional social benefits such as NHS, welfare etc.
(My actual NI contributions to date are not much more than £100,000 for 33 full years of contribution and a few partial years - I wasn't a v high earner until later in my career).

Isn't there a max NI? most years when I had 2-3 part time jobs I ended up paying over 5K and HMRC used to send me some back - they are just checking on a couple of other years now

Flugelhorn

Malthusian said:

Flugelhorn said:

I have added mine up - comes to over £90K - even that won't pay many years of State Pension

Don't forget to deduct from the £90k your health insurance premiums (the amount that covers the NHS) and your premiums for Statutory Sick Pay and Jobseekers' Allowance / ESA. (Also bereavement payments, but the cost of those are essentially nil.) 

The NHS alone costs an average of about £4,400 per year per working age adult in 2024 money.

Obviously the idea that National Insurance covers all those is a fantasy. But it's the fantasy that sold the tax to the electorate. Just as we're all happy to pay income tax until Napoleon is defeated. 

The idea that people have "paid for their State Pension" is the same fantasy. You can't tell children that the Tooth Fairy exists and then moan when they expect coins under their pillow.

too right, I got paid by the NHS and then paid back bucket loads of tax to run the organisation

michaels

ex-pat_scot said:

My NI on salary around the £100k mark (after whopping pension contributions, to keep out of the high marginal tax rate) is around £6,400 pa.
At 35 years of this it would give c£225,000 total NI contributions. This is rather unrealistic, but serves to show how modest even a high earner's contributions are, when set against the broad equivalent annuity cost of the SP at around £250,000 and also the other notional social benefits such as NHS, welfare etc.
(My actual NI contributions to date are not much more than £100,000 for 33 full years of contribution and a few partial years - I wasn't a v high earner until later in my career).

Don't forget as well as the bit of NI you see, there is also employers NI.  Both bits are effectively a wedge between what it costs an employer to employ you and what ends up in your pocket so are economically equivalent.  The employers rate is 13.8% I think with no upper cap so in reality you have probably 'paid' at least twice as much NI as the bit deducted from your salary.

Malthusian

ProDave said:

The gist of what we are seeing on the news was people were not notified directly by letter and must have lived in a bubble with never watching any news and it came as a shock to them at the last minute when they suddenly found they had another 5 years to wait before they got their state pension.  Is that a fair summary?

The gist of the Ombudsman's decision is that people were notified by letter, in 2009, but the DWP spent far too long to do this, having first recognised the need to start sending out letters in 2006 after research conducted in 2005.

155. DWP failed to act promptly on its 2006 proposal to write directly to affected women, or to give due weight to how much time had already been lost for women who remained unaware of the changes in the 11 years since the 1995 Pensions Act. It appears to have made no progress in developing its proposals between November 2006 and December 2007, despite the November 2006 memo saying an approach for direct mailing would be shared with Ministers before Christmas. We take that to mean Christmas 2006. We have seen no evidence a ministerial submission was made until December 2007.

[...] 165. We know that it took 16 months for letters to be issued once DWP decided in December 2007 to send them. If DWP had made a reasonable decision about direct mail in August 2005, and over a year of planning and implementation time had not been lost between November 2006 and December 2007, it is likely letters about the effects of the 1995 Pensions Act would have been issued within 16 months of August 2005 (that is, from December 2006). That is 28 months earlier than when DWP actually started to issue them (April 2009).

The implication of the Ombudsman's logic is that the DWP has been too helpful towards 1950s-born women for its own good (or rather the public's good).

If the DWP had not been so assiduous in commissioning research to find out how many women did not yet know their new State Pension Age, and exploring ways to increase the percentage, but instead had said "We have done enough, and if anyone still doesn't known their new SPA, that's their problem", that would seem to fall within the bounds of the DWP's discretion, and no compensation would have been payable.

47. [The DWP] has also suggested we have interpreted the Civil Service Code as requiring government departments to notify the public about changes in the law. [M: Which everyone agrees would be a nonsense. It would impose out of nowhere an incredibly onerous burden on the Government, and overturn the millennia-old legal principle that ignorance is no defence under the law. Hence the DWP's argument that if this is what the Ombudsman are saying, the case for compensation is a nonsense.]

48. It is not our view that the Civil Service Code imposes a duty on government departments to notify the public about all changes in the law. The relevant principle up to 2006 was the duty to give the public as full information as possible. In our view, the context assists in understanding what that duty meant in this case.

49. In this case, DWP itself decided the public should be informed about changes in State Pension age.  Once DWP knew information was not reaching the people who needed it and there was more it could do, it should have done more to ensure the public had as full information as possible. [emph added]

In the Ombudsman's eyes, all that research the DWP did (and very slowly acted upon) formed a petard which the Ombudsman has grabbed and stuffed down the DWP's throat (i.e. the taxpayer's).

To illustrate: under the Ombudsman's logic, if the Government passes a law that makes farting in public illegal, and then does precisely nothing to inform the public and leaves it to the newspapers, there can be no case for compensation if someone unaware of the law breaks wind in public and is fined. Doing so would overturn the principle of "ignorance is no defence under the law", and without that principle, the rule of law collapses instantly.

If on the other hand the Government commissions research in advance of the law taking effect, and the researchers find that 50% of the public are unaware of the new law and propose a direct mailing campaign to address this, and it takes the Government a year longer than strictly necessary to undertake the campaign, then anyone who broke the new law in the first year should be let off. 

If a year later 25% of the public are still unaware, the Government is now in the clear and can issue fines at will because it has already done what the research said it should. Unless they make the mistake of commissioning more research.

Conclusion: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and ignorance is bliss. With great knowledge comes great responsibility. With great responsibility comes great blame. With great blame comes great level 3 compo.

Silvertabby

I've heard people argue that the rules in place when someone started work should still be applied at retirement, with any new rules only applying to younger people who started work later, ie in full knowledge the new regulations.

If that were the case, then the mid 1970s Sex Equality and Equal Pay Acts wouldn't apply to me or all the others who started work before 1975.

A case of be careful what you wish for.....