WASPI ‘victory’

Pollycat

Andy_L said:

p00hsticks said:

Silvertabby said:

She said that didn't count - WASPE  had told her that only individual letters did, and that everyone had to say that they didn't get a letter/didn't know or they wouldn't get their pensions backdated to 60.

By that criteria, perhaps any compo should be conditional on people being able to produce their original individually addressed letters telling them that they would reach State Pension Age at the age of 60.....

IIRC one of the waspis at the court case produced the letter informing her off the very increase in retirement age she was denying ever being informed of. The judge congratulated her on her honesty 

Yes, you do recall correctly.

I guess she was following this advice:

Silvertabby said:

I bumped into an ex colleague just before Covid.  I was surprised to see that she was wearing a WASPE supporters badge.  She was equally surprised to learn that I was not a member.  

I pointed out that she certainly knew about the changes at least as far back as 2000/2001, because that's when we both attended training courses which included how the increases, from 2010 onwards, would affect how we applied GMP to pension records.

She said that didn't count - WASPE  had told her that only individual letters did, and that everyone had to say that they didn't get a letter/didn't know or they wouldn't get their pensions backdated to 60.

P.S.  Before anyone asks - I didn't join the pensions industry until after I retired from the RAF, a few years after the mid 1990s announcements.

It's astonishing that WASPI couldn't find a different woman who really could say she didn't get a letter to spearhead this case.

jem16

Pollycat said:

Andy_L said:

p00hsticks said:

Silvertabby said:

She said that didn't count - WASPE  had told her that only individual letters did, and that everyone had to say that they didn't get a letter/didn't know or they wouldn't get their pensions backdated to 60.

By that criteria, perhaps any compo should be conditional on people being able to produce their original individually addressed letters telling them that they would reach State Pension Age at the age of 60.....

IIRC one of the waspis at the court case produced the letter informing her off the very increase in retirement age she was denying ever being informed of. The judge congratulated her on her honesty 

Yes, you do recall correctly.

I guess she was following this advice:

Silvertabby said:

I bumped into an ex colleague just before Covid.  I was surprised to see that she was wearing a WASPE supporters badge.  She was equally surprised to learn that I was not a member.  

I pointed out that she certainly knew about the changes at least as far back as 2000/2001, because that's when we both attended training courses which included how the increases, from 2010 onwards, would affect how we applied GMP to pension records.

She said that didn't count - WASPE  had told her that only individual letters did, and that everyone had to say that they didn't get a letter/didn't know or they wouldn't get their pensions backdated to 60.

P.S.  Before anyone asks - I didn't join the pensions industry until after I retired from the RAF, a few years after the mid 1990s announcements.

It's astonishing that WASPI couldn't find a different woman who really could say she didn't get a letter to spearhead this case.

It wasn't a Waspi case. That was the BT60 JR and most of their case was about perceived discrimination. All grounds dismissed in the end by 5 different Judges.

BT60 has now got an ex Fiji Judge to say there was direct discrimination and only for 50s' women. Nobody else was affected apparently. So with no experience in UK laws she knows better than 5 Judges, one of who was the 2nd most senior Judge in England.

Pollycat

jem16 said:

Pollycat said:

Andy_L said:

p00hsticks said:

Silvertabby said:

She said that didn't count - WASPE  had told her that only individual letters did, and that everyone had to say that they didn't get a letter/didn't know or they wouldn't get their pensions backdated to 60.

By that criteria, perhaps any compo should be conditional on people being able to produce their original individually addressed letters telling them that they would reach State Pension Age at the age of 60.....

IIRC one of the waspis at the court case produced the letter informing her off the very increase in retirement age she was denying ever being informed of. The judge congratulated her on her honesty 

Yes, you do recall correctly.

I guess she was following this advice:

Silvertabby said:

I bumped into an ex colleague just before Covid.  I was surprised to see that she was wearing a WASPE supporters badge.  She was equally surprised to learn that I was not a member.  

I pointed out that she certainly knew about the changes at least as far back as 2000/2001, because that's when we both attended training courses which included how the increases, from 2010 onwards, would affect how we applied GMP to pension records.

She said that didn't count - WASPE  had told her that only individual letters did, and that everyone had to say that they didn't get a letter/didn't know or they wouldn't get their pensions backdated to 60.

P.S.  Before anyone asks - I didn't join the pensions industry until after I retired from the RAF, a few years after the mid 1990s announcements.

It's astonishing that WASPI couldn't find a different woman who really could say she didn't get a letter to spearhead this case.

It wasn't a Waspi case. That was the BT60 JR and most of their case was about perceived discrimination. All grounds dismissed in the end by 5 different Judges.

BT60 has now got an ex Fiji Judge to say there was direct discrimination and only for 50s' women. Nobody else was affected apparently. So with no experience in UK laws she knows better than 5 Judges, one of who was the 2nd most senior Judge in England.

OK, thanks for the correction.

But...It's astonishing that BT60 couldn't find a different woman who really could say she didn't get a letter to spearhead this case.

Fiji judge?

Talk about clutching at straws.

I feel sorry for the women who have funded these 2 organisations in the belief that they will get a payout.

Flugelhorn

Best (and most unforgettable) letter re pensions that I ever got was NHS choices about whether to stay in the 1995 scheme or move to 2008.
The pack was  handed over  by practice manager and I had to sign for it!

Opened it to the statement
"we do  not have enough data  to be able to provide you with any information as to how the two schemes would affect you"

Thanks I thought and rang the agency to be told I was part of 6% who they couldn't advise but I had to make a decision anyway ... 

Pat38493

Silvertabby said:

Pat38493 said:

Interestingly I was talking to 2 relatives both in their 60s yesterday.  One of them was a management accountant and the other was part of a couple who had an accountant and financial adviser for decades.  

Both of them swear blind that they were not aware they had lost their right to a state pension at 60 until fairly recently and they insist that they never received any direct correspondence about it.  

I can half believe this as it’s the same with the NHS pension changes on the McCloud stuff - my wife never received a letter about it but the NHS insists that she did.

When the LGPS switched from final salary to CARE in 2014 we put out what we thought was a tsnunami of information....

Backs of pay statements for those who still had paper statements, attachments to on-line statements.

Personal e-mails to those on the intranet system, flyers for those who weren't.

Info packs to managers, including copies of flyers that they could hand out, and posters for notice boards.

Quarterly pensions information leaflet.

Yet, time after time when we mentioned the new pension scheme in routine phone calls, we got..."what new scheme - why haven't we been told about it?"  When we pointed out that we had been pushing out information for some time, the response "well, who ever bothers to read about boring pensions" was pretty standard.

Well I suppose in the case of the SP, the riposte would be, if you don’t know anything about pensions and they are so boring, what made you think you were going to get your pension at age 60 in the first place?  

As I recall when I first logged in to gov.uk pension estimate I was vaguely thinking I would get my SP at 65 so I was slightly surprised it was going to be 67 but I wasn’t going to start up a protest movement about it.

That said, nobody seems to be claiming that the pension age should have been equalised the other way i.e. men should have got it from 60 or it should have converged in the middle and then gone up from there.  Weirdly it looks like that is what happened with my DB pension where the documentation seems to indicate that the portion of my pension accrued before a certain date has an NRA of 60, even though my original work contract states the retirement age is 65.  The only reason I can think of for this is that they equalised the men to 60.

Sarahspangles

Silvertabby said:

Pat38493 said:

Interestingly I was talking to 2 relatives both in their 60s yesterday.  One of them was a management accountant and the other was part of a couple who had an accountant and financial adviser for decades.  

Both of them swear blind that they were not aware they had lost their right to a state pension at 60 until fairly recently and they insist that they never received any direct correspondence about it.  

I can half believe this as it’s the same with the NHS pension changes on the McCloud stuff - my wife never received a letter about it but the NHS insists that she did.

When the LGPS switched from final salary to CARE in 2014 we put out what we thought was a tsnunami of information....

Backs of pay statements for those who still had paper statements, attachments to on-line statements.

Personal e-mails to those on the intranet system, flyers for those who weren't.

Info packs to managers, including copies of flyers that they could hand out, and posters for notice boards.

Quarterly pensions information leaflet.

Yet, time after time when we mentioned the new pension scheme in routine phone calls, we got..."what new scheme - why haven't we been told about it?"  When we pointed out that we had been pushing out information for some time, the response "well, who ever bothers to read about boring pensions" was pretty standard.

I’m trying to remember what I knew/thought I knew about my pension at different stages in my life.  I definitely knew in 1995 that the age I could get state pension was changing.  I don’t remember the other women I worked with being particularly bothered, the majority were older than me and relying on their husband’s income so they could stop working well before 60, once the mortgage was paid off and children had left home.  The younger ones on a career path were more focussed on their DB pension.

I do remember a real kerfuffle with male colleagues trying to take early retirement before the LGPS rules changed.  This is possibly why I though the 85 year rule was never going to apply to me (thanks again @Silvertabby)

I do remember the CARE changes when I was back in an LGPS scheme in 2014, and the rise in SPA from 65 to 67 for my age group, but I didn’t invest much time in understanding either because I’d already decided to switch to contract work by this point and take some breaks between contracts rather than work full time up to R day.

Of course as retirement gets closer and especially now my OH has retired, I do wish I hadn’t so long to go, but I can’t say I didn’t know in advance.

p00hsticks

Pat38493 said:

That said, nobody seems to be claiming that the pension age should have been equalised the other way i.e. men should have got it from 60 or it should have converged in the middle and then gone up from there.  

I believe there were a few males who argued that it should have been done that way, but it simply wouldn't have been financially viable given the then increases in longevity.

After all, even the original timetable by which the womens SPA was increased to 65 had to be accelerated to cater for the further increase of both men and women to 66 to try to prevent an unsupportable drain on the taxpayer.  

Silvertabby

Sarahspangles said:

Silvertabby said:

Pat38493 said:

Interestingly I was talking to 2 relatives both in their 60s yesterday.  One of them was a management accountant and the other was part of a couple who had an accountant and financial adviser for decades.  

Both of them swear blind that they were not aware they had lost their right to a state pension at 60 until fairly recently and they insist that they never received any direct correspondence about it.  

I can half believe this as it’s the same with the NHS pension changes on the McCloud stuff - my wife never received a letter about it but the NHS insists that she did.

When the LGPS switched from final salary to CARE in 2014 we put out what we thought was a tsnunami of information....

Backs of pay statements for those who still had paper statements, attachments to on-line statements.

Personal e-mails to those on the intranet system, flyers for those who weren't.

Info packs to managers, including copies of flyers that they could hand out, and posters for notice boards.

Quarterly pensions information leaflet.

Yet, time after time when we mentioned the new pension scheme in routine phone calls, we got..."what new scheme - why haven't we been told about it?"  When we pointed out that we had been pushing out information for some time, the response "well, who ever bothers to read about boring pensions" was pretty standard.

I’m trying to remember what I knew/thought I knew about my pension at different stages in my life.  I definitely knew in 1995 that the age I could get state pension was changing.  I don’t remember the other women I worked with being particularly bothered, the majority were older than me and relying on their husband’s income so they could stop working well before 60, once the mortgage was paid off and children had left home.  The younger ones on a career path were more focussed on their DB pension.

I do remember a real kerfuffle with male colleagues trying to take early retirement before the LGPS rules changed.  This is possibly why I though the 85 year rule was never going to apply to me (thanks again @Silvertabby)

I do remember the CARE changes when I was back in an LGPS scheme in 2014, and the rise in SPA from 65 to 67 for my age group, but I didn’t invest much time in understanding either because I’d already decided to switch to contract work by this point and take some breaks between contracts rather than work full time up to R day.

Of course as retirement gets closer and especially now my OH has retired, I do wish I hadn’t so long to go, but I can’t say I didn’t know in advance.

The original LGPS NRA was 65 for both men and women, with R85 applying equally to both genders.

However, it was the case that more men than women actually qualifed for full R85, because they tended to accrue more service. 

I would say that many women LGPS members  'assumed' that their retirement age was 60, just because that was their SPA, and retired from their LGPS jobs to tally with that.  The pension details letter, sent once the pension had been calculated and put into payment, would have stated how much the pension had been reduced by for early payment - but I'm willing to bet that the majority of recipients just read as far as the payment amount, and didn't bother to read the 'boring bits'.

DoublePolaroid

Flugelhorn said:

Best (and most unforgettable) letter re pensions that I ever got was NHS choices about whether to stay in the 1995 scheme or move to 2008.
The pack was  handed over  by practice manager and I had to sign for it!

Opened it to the statement
"we do  not have enough data  to be able to provide you with any information as to how the two schemes would affect you"

Thanks I thought and rang the agency to be told I was part of 6% who they couldn't advise but I had to make a decision anyway ... 

Because I was dumb, in my twenties at the time and couldn’t be bothered to read what seemed like an interminably complex pack of soon to be waste paper, I gave zero thought to it bar the following:

The government want me to change to the new scheme therefore I am definitely going to remain in the old one. 

Flugelhorn

DoublePolaroid said:

Flugelhorn said:

Best (and most unforgettable) letter re pensions that I ever got was NHS choices about whether to stay in the 1995 scheme or move to 2008.
The pack was  handed over  by practice manager and I had to sign for it!

Opened it to the statement
"we do  not have enough data  to be able to provide you with any information as to how the two schemes would affect you"

Thanks I thought and rang the agency to be told I was part of 6% who they couldn't advise but I had to make a decision anyway ... 

Because I was dumb, in my twenties at the time and couldn’t be bothered to read what seemed like an interminably complex pack of soon to be waste paper, I gave zero thought to it bar the following:

The government want me to change to the new scheme therefore I am definitely going to remain in the old one. 

Probably the right decision - I got told by the chap on the phone:

If you want to retire before 62.5 then stick with 1995
If you want to retire after 62.5 then change to 2008

I was planning to get the money at 60 so no contest really.