Well I see no point either…
Tom’s arguments are laid out in the Times and are straightforward. I mark agreement green “agree”, orange “maybe” and “red” , I don’t agree. Overall, I can’t agree with the Government wasting more time on WASPI. I agree with Tom
Ten arguments with Tom’s word in black
- It’s Labour’s turn Pat McFadden is the 10th Secretary of State for Work and Pensions since Iain Duncan Smith in 2010. While not all of his predecessors may have considered the WASPI issue directly, it is notable that not one of them has concluded that the cause justified the payment of compensation. McFadden should follow in their footsteps and resist the demands for compensation.
2. Women should have known better For those women who were genuinely blindsided by the late discovery that the goalposts had been moved without their knowledge, I do feel sympathy: it must have been a deeply unpleasant moment. This, though, does not absolve them of their responsibility to check for themselves how much their state pension would be and when it would be paid
3. Some women this is no more than a hobby in retirement for leaders
The fact that some Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi) campaigners originally sought to have the whole state pension age change overturned, and for their pensions to reset to age 60 at the cost of tens of billions of pounds, suggests that for some this is little more than a grift, a hobby in retirement to try squeezing some extra cash out of the state with no more personal cost and downside than the time invested in campaigning.
- Women think they should have been personally notified The critical defining question of the WASPI issue is whether the government made accurate information readily available about the changes to women’s state pension ages. The WASPI campaigners say that the government failed to take adequate steps to reach out and personally notify them individually of the changes to their entitlement.
5. With private DB funds in decline, Women should take financial planning into their hands This is a dangerous road down which we do not want to go. With the decline of defined benefit (also known as final salary) schemes for all but the fortunate few public sector workers, it is now critical that each and every one of us takes personal responsibility for planning our finances for later life.
6. We all need to have a plan – it doesn’t have to be a pension but… What your plan looks like — saving in a pension, becoming a buy-to-let landlord, whatever — is secondary. The important thing is that we all need to have a plan. I cannot emphasise this enough. For the government to concede that because the Waspi women failed to do this they should be compensated would be perverse in the extreme.
7. The state failure falls well below the “threshold of culpability”. There are rare examples of state failure that are so egregious and damaging that a legitimate case for compensation can be made: the failures over infected blood and the post office computer systems are two such cases. The communication of changes to women’s state pension age falls well short of this threshold of culpability. It was widely publicised both at the time the decisions were made and subsequently.
8. This cohort of women have the best of UK’s wealth. As a cohort, the baby boomers have the best of the UK’s wealth, having ridden the demographic escalator that led to housing and pension wealth. For younger generations the picture is far less rosy.
9. Who pays the cost if costs are granted? Any compensation paid to these campaigners involves a transfer of wealth from other members of society. For young adults who are struggling to buy their first home, deal with the cost of living and save for their own retirement, having a government tell them that they must pay for this would be an extraordinary rejection of their own ambitions in life.
10. We’re broke. We know the government has run out of our money and that the budget in a couple of weeks will involve demands for more. WASPI compensation should not be added to that list of demands.
Four in green, five in orange and only one in red when I don’t agree.
Dozen or baker’s dozen? You decide
I have a couple of what I consider green and that makes a dozen
- We have too much pension legislation and a pension commission already, we don’t need to reopen another can of worms
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I agree that the women needed an investigation and backed them at that. I was seen as a supporter and am sorry for them (it wasn’t well managed). But we had the investigation and the line should be drawn beneath it. There is a worry that nothing will be finalised/
You might to make it a baker’s dozen in the comments section below.
The numbers and the process are outlined by the Financial Times here.
Repeating and updating my comment of just over a year and a half ago:
Rachel and Sir Keir say the money’s not there, but it was, and maybe still is?
The National Insurance “Fund” (budgeted to have one-sixth of the annual benefits spend as a working balance at all times) at the last fiscal year-end before Labour came to power was £86bn, two-thirds of annual spend, four times the budget. HM Treasury had also set aside another £6.5bn, if needed.
Waspi comp at an average of £2,950 for all only needs around £10bn.
As of March 31, 2025, the National Insurance Fund (NIF) had a total investment value of £78.462bn, a decrease from the previous year due to a net withdrawal of funds.
The fund nevertheless “earned” £4.068bn in total comprehensive income during the 2024-2025 financial year through its investment strategy, which was “designed to correlate with short-term sterling interest rates and protect capital”.
This income was generated by the National Insurance Fund Investment Account (NIFIA).
£10bn represents less than three years of this “income”.
Surely any compensation should be to men who suffered from sexual discrimination for so many years and had to wait 5 years longer to get their state pensions.
I suspect your comment was tongue-in-cheek, Richard?
Men did not widely challenge the difference in state pension ages (when it was 60 for women, 65 for men) because the disparity was said to be a historical norm and, for a long time, was (mistakenly?) considered an advantage for women rather than discrimination against men.
When the pension age was eventually equalised, men did not launch widespread challenges to the resulting change, partly because it was a response to emerging evidence of longer life expectancies and a move towards greater gender equality in pension systems.
(But “pensioner” bus passes, for example, were typically equalised at age 60 rather than later ages.)
The legal argument was that equalising the pension ages was a correction of a past asymmetry, not a new (or pre-existing) discrimination.
The process of equalising state pension ages was underway by 1995, but required time to implement in order to protect older women from receiving a comparatively inadequate pension.
The intention to do this was announced in a white paper in 1993, slowly reacting to an EU (then EC) directive in 1986, which had resolved some ambiguity around pillar one statutory versus pillar two occupational pensions.
If you disregard that ambiguity and look back further for when the spirit rather than the letter of the law changed, there was an earlier EC directive in 1978.
The previous state pension change was made in the UK by the Old Age and Widows’ Pension Act 1940, for women to have a lower pension age, at a time when women tended:
* to have poorer health, arguably.
* to have far smaller pensions, as they weren’t, at that time (or even today!) equally paid, or even part of the workforce long enough in terms of opportunities, the range of available work, and often expected to leave work upon marriage.
* to be expected/required do more unpaid care work, not just childcare but looking after elderly relatives as well.
* to be required to do more unpaid work (housework), none of which was in an occupational pension.
* and married women would not receive half or even any of their husbands’ pension if he predeceased; some might receive back a lump sum of their husbands’ contributions, but by no means all.
Thus, even when getting their state pensions five years earlier, women were generally much worse off financially than their male counterparts.
Over time from then on, women did enter the workforce more and for longer, and some (but not all) unpaid care work was put in the hands of others (childcare providers, old peoples’ homes). Women’s opportunities, in terms of range of jobs and renumeration certainly increased, so at some point their pensions started more closely to approach (or exceptionally match) those of men.
Having women receive their pension earlier and on average for longer meant they may end up getting more than their male counterparts, which is why this was finally addressed from 1995, but phased in.
The original phasing was to be between 2010 and 2020, but it was then brought forward to 2018, with limited notice, and DWP have recently admitted that a form
of attention-grabbing notice planned for 2007 was then withdrawn.
Most women born in the 1940s or 1950s, however, would still have been less likely to have a comparable amount of contributions based pensions built up, so adding an extra five years to their pension age would still leave them with a smaller pension than many men.