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Paying off WASPI – is this about our kids or our men?

henry tapper

Demonstrators in support of public sector staff striking over pension changes are pictured outside the Houses of Parliament in London, on November 30, 2011. Up to two million public sector workers in Britain went on strike over changes to their pensions, after the government responded to slashed growth forecasts with fresh spending cuts. AFP PHOTO / ADRIAN DENNIS (Photo credit should read ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/Getty Images)

This is not a pro or anti WASPI blog, it is a place where different people’s vies can be heard and provided they are put in a fair and reasonable way, I am happy to accommodate views on all sides of an argument. To remind ourselves, this is what the argument is about

a DWP communication on WASPI

The questions are about communication , can people make head or tails of tables like this.

Inter gender or intergenerational

Over the weekend, Steve Groves, a thoroughly good man, asked me whether I would be prepared to pay national insurance on my pension income. I don’t pay myself a lot from my companies so my pension is important to me and I had to gulp before saying “yes”, but you can’t run a blog saying “I’m prepared to pay the price of WASPI” without backing it up.

As most people don’t know, national insurance pays for two things

  1. The price of the state pension
  2. A contribution to the costs of the NHS

My personal views is that pensioners should continue to pay national insurance , albeit at a lower rate, reflecting the likelihood that they have a full 35 years pension credits for the state pension. If they haven’t , they can buy them or continue to build them up through work. I will expand on this as I’m getting help on this from friends. My point is that I don’t think that the cost of providing limited compensation to WASPI should be met by a younger generation. I do recognise that compensation is due.

This is not Steve’s position which is clearly set out on Linked in . Since it is so expertly curated on that site – I can replicate here  (apologies for any omissions).

The conversation follows my publishing a blog over the weekend, suggesting that WASPI is only a partial claim for women’s rights to a better share of household pension wealth

To be fair to me, my blog was about inter-gender fairness, not about inter-generational fairness. But the WASPI argument is as much about “who pays” rather than whether compensation is due. Beverley echoes Steve Webb

But let’s say that the WASPI women are asking this to be about the young paying their compo. Here Steve builds up a head of steam

It’s a fair point, though I have not seen much correlation between involvement in education and financial literacy.

Steve is warming to his theme

 

Steve uses selective examples of entitlement to argue his case and I can see there being fury if people get compensated where they have no just complaint. But this is equally the case in civil cases against banks (PPI) or against car sales firms (car finance). Blanket compensation cannot be selective, the burden of proof is too expensive to produce or to assess. Nor can we means test.

I will finish by re-emphasising my point. I believe that more women are being short-changed by men through the unfair distribution of household income (especially on divorce and separation) than women unfairly deprived of state pension.

I think this is a local problem that can better be sorted out through a tax on pensioners, which is needed anyway to fund the NHS.

Generations to come stand to benefit from the re-rating of the state pension due to the triple lock, something that I am pleased to see is under no threat from a future Conservative Government (unlikely)

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