David Robbins is right to demand that WASPI stops being kicked about like a football – scoring random goals but not in a coherent way.
Today’s Conservative line on “waspi” seems to be:
– saying money should be no object if there was an injustice;
– not saying whether or not an injustice had been suffered (just pointing out that what some senior Labour figures had said on the subject).What happened to the… pic.twitter.com/ruUQi9Ecba
— David Robbins (@David_J_Robbins) January 29, 2026
Time to move on from the past to the future?
As my actuarial friend in Brighton comments on the past politics
Waspi was like GMP
Something which got trapped in a legal quagmire and wasted a lot of time needlessly.
and the future – pensioner taxation
I hope the government soon decides that pensioners should at least pay the NHS element of NI contributions.
National Insurance has nothing to do with state pensions or the NI Fund. Nor indeed the NHS.
It is purely a tax not paid by people over SPA nor on pension income below SPA.
Far be it from me to disagree with your actuary friend in Brighton, who probably went to the same school as me, Henry, but …
Pensioners should not pay NI for the NHS because NI is designed as a working‑life contribution system, and today’s pensioners have already met that obligation in the years when they earned and used the NHS far less than they do now or in the future.
NI was expanded after WW2 as a social insurance contribution from workers to fund national schemes including health care and state pensions.
It is explicitly levied on earnings during working life; pensions are not treated as earnings and are therefore exempt from NI.
People build their entitlement to the state pension by paying NI for a set number of qualifying years (usually 35 for the full new State Pension), so the “contract” is: pay while you work, receive support when you retire.
From this perspective, asking pensioners to resume NI is like charging them twice for the same social insurance they were told was covered by past contributions.
They already prepaid during lower‑use years.
Most people use the NHS relatively lightly in early and mid‑adulthood and much more in later life; health spending on those over 85, for example, is estimated at several times the spending on people in their 30s.
The post‑WW2 settlement assumed this life‑cycle pattern: workers pay NI while healthier, then draw more heavily on the NHS and taxable pensions in older age.
The core fairness argument is that today’s pensioners accepted lower net wages during their careers because NI was deducted to fund a system that would look after them when they were old; changing the rules now undermines that implicit intergenerational contract.
Only a minority of NI revenue goes directly to the NHS anyway; most (about four‑fifths in 2022/23) is paid into the National Insurance Fund, which mainly pays current state pensions.
NI is therefore a broad social insurance contribution, not a direct “NHS subscription”, and is linked to state pension entitlements built up in working life.
If pensioners were asked to pay some NI ostensibly “for the NHS”, they would in effect be contributing twice to a system they were told they had already funded, while their state pension is being paid out of current workers’ NI, in effect a Ponzi scheme.
Finally, in having a more honest relationship with the NHS, perhaps someone should explain better to those working in the NHS that their pension funding is not “in surplus”, when all it means is that current contributions exceed pensions in payment annually by a few billions?
Meanwhile, the actuarial value of future NHS pensions increases each year by a lot (tens of billions) more than any “annual surplus”.
Derek is right, but retrospective legislation is no stranger to the UK government.
There is an opportunity to make a contribution with the objective of simplifying the PR representative’s job outlined in this weeks Pension Newsletter 177.
Inheritance tax for pensions
HMRC are looking for volunteers to test their new digital service that will allow pension schemes and pension scheme practitioners to report details of an inheritance tax payment notice.
The research will take place throughout January and beyond. This is an opportunity to tell HMRC what you think works well or does not, and provide opinions on the proposed service.
Email pensionsuserresearchrecruitment@hmrc.gov.uk to sign up.
Maybe an opportunity and a new profit stream for AgeWage, acting as a PR with access to the dashboard. See Lords Report I summarised yesterday
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pensions-schemes-newsletter-177-january-2026/newsletter-177-january-2026
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5901/ldselect/ldeconaf/250/250.pdf
Partial Summary:
The report contains a good number of recommendations to the Government, many of which reference the lack of finalised support and legislation covering these reforms. It recommends that, unless clarity is available before 6 April 2026, then, these changes should be pushed back. In addition, it sees that the Pensions Dashboard needs to be fully implemented to ensure that Personal Representatives (PRs) can easily access all the scheme details needed to process the estate efficiently.