A big update over WASPI has been issued – as women affected by the historic injustices in the state pension demand compensation. The Department for Work and Pensions ( DWP ) is under pressure to bring in £2,950 compensation payments as part of a scheme to reimburse those impacted.
And now a new poll shows the majority BACK WASPI women’s bid for pay. The latest poll from the WASPI campaign shows that the public is at odds with this stance, with a substantial three-quarters (64%) of respondents calling on ministers to follow the PHSO’s recommendations and provide “fair compensation”.
Paula Taylor, 69, is one of the estimated 3.8 million women who were affected by changes to the state pension age. She told The i Paper she has worked in finance all her life but she didn’t know about the raised pension age until she was 55, only five years before her anticipated state pension age of 60.
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“I totally dispute that 90 per cent of Waspi women would have known about the change in state pension age,” she said. “I worked as a book-keeper at various companies, but I didn’t know about it and nobody else seemed to know. I wasn’t officially told and only found out when I was 55 when I read something in a newspaper saying that retirement age was now 65 for women and I thought: ‘When did that happen?’
“Then when I got nearer to 65, I was horrified when they said the state pension age was now 66.” She fumed: “We were simply not told and I found out far too late to do anything about it. Luckily for me, the repercussions weren’t too bad as I am fit and healthy and I didn’t dislike work. But I would rather have been retired and ended up retiring later than I would have liked.
“In those days, most women had quite a bit of time off bringing up the children. Then when I started work again, it was generally part-time as I had to drop off and pick up the children from school. So my chances of paying into a pension then were literally nil because I earned so little.”