Women's Pension Loss of over £50,000

Many women born in the 1950s have seen their incomes dive because they expected to receive their state pension at age 60 and were astonished to discover, without adequate notice for any preparation, that their pension age was to be increased to 65. 3.4 million women have been affected by the lack of notice of the 1995 and 2011 Pensions Acts and the Government did not observe an appropriate timeframe for this change. Worse, the state pension was further increased, to 66 for some and 67 for others. Women affected by these changes are advised to write to the DWP where over 700 complaints are being investigated in October 2017. The WASPI (Women Against Pensions Inequality) campaign provides guidance on how to complain. See http://www.waspi.co.uk/action

The cancellation of these pension payments at the April 2017 state pension rate of £155.65 per week means a loss to each of these women of £8,093 per year, totalling £40,469 for the 5 years, £48,563 for 6 years, and £56,657 for 7 years of these cancelled payments. Would a private pension provider be able to get away with this, when members had been paying into the scheme in good faith throughout their working lives?

Added to this conundrum is the fact that many people over 50 find it difficult, and often impossible, to find work at all, whether through redundancy or expired contracts.  Barking MP, Margaret Hodge commented that, "In a world that sees no value in maturity or experience, [balancing family with work] is an uphill battle."  No company or business would surely want to waste a lifetime of accumulated wisdom and experience and yet the over 50s continue to be unattractive to employers.  Mature workers generally have good interpersonal skills, are reliable and hugely experienced. Consider the numbers of single women over 50 who cannot find any work, or where you see most working women of that age. Regardless of their levels of education you will find many of them sitting at tills in supermarkets or helping customers in DIY chains.

Women over 50 need a decent job and an income just like everyone else. Either employers take on women over 50, or the Government allows these rather marginalised women to receive their pensions earlier than at 67.

The UK’s many divorced older women will, if they are able to get work, earn only around £15 – 18,000 to manage home and rising living costs. Newspaper articles describing ‘typical’ salaries averaging £30,000 apply to well qualified and long experienced nurses or teachers, not to clerical or administrative and retail staff. 

Women’s pay has been too low for too long. The debate on the Citizen’s Wage continues and everyone earning the same salary may never be workable, but why is the hourly rate for female graduate office workers, which requires intellectual rigour and organisation, merely £7.80 - £11? Why do male, manual trades pay such high wages, eg plasterers, bricklayers and plumbers at £30 – £40 per hour? Why are clerical or administrative staff and retail staff valued at so little, and paid half the rate of teachers and nurses?  Currently advertised jobs requesting graduates are only offering around £18,000 which leaves little spare cash for pension contributions on such low salaries.

It is time newspaper columnists stopped writing about the Baby Boomers being comfortably off. Some of them are; retirees who have remained married or have re-married, who are sharing household expenses and have two incoming pensions, are doing all right.

However, ‘Women are more likely to live in poverty than men [with] single people living alone, private tenants and Asian pensioners . . at particular risk,’ (Age UK).  Widowed or, more frequently, divorced, single older people with the same household expenses, but with only one pension are sliding gracelessly into poverty. This generation, left school aged 16 during the late 1960s and 1970s, at a time when expectations were heart-breakingly low for teenage girls, expected to get an office job or low paid retail work until they got married. (When young women stopped work to raise their children their National Insurance contributions towards the state pension were deducted from their husbands’ salaries.)

This generation of girls were also victims of shameful social engineering: because girls were outperforming boys, huge number of bright girls had their 11-plus exam results ‘adjusted’ to hold them back while less bright boys were put forward to ensure a 50-50 gender balance in grammar schools, and prevent boys feeling outclassed. (Arnot et al from Jennifer Marchbank and Gayle Letherby’s Introduction to Gender: Social Science Perspectives). Secondary modern education further lowered their expectations, limited their life chances, affected self-esteem and reduced their earning capacity (but that’s another story). Work available to girls was low paid, and workplace or private pension contributions were consequently unaffordable.

During the 1970s and early 1980s these couples often lived a simple lifestyle on their one income, paying their National Insurance for the State Pension, and so were just getting by. (Holidays and eating out only became the norm after the very late 1980s). Return to further low paid work after the children went to school meant both low income and no career progression. A couple with modest habits could manage like this but not after divorce, splitting the family home and reducing to a single income.  The poverty of single, older people is an increasing cause for concern.

People could be given the option to retire at 55 or 60, receive the current state pension of £155.65 per week, and elect to work the number of hours to earn that pension for the public good, whether that’s in a caring profession, or some other workplace. At the minimum wage of £7.50 per hour (for those over 25), this equates to 20.75 hours each week. These hours could be used for currently unpaid caring work that women in their 60s do: Early Years care for grandchildren, supporting family members - often elderly parents - with taxiing to appointments, shopping and cleaning or other voluntary sector and charitable work which would benefit their communities.

I am not suggesting that they receive their pensions at 50 and sit around watching daytime TV.  Being paid around £155 for 20-21 hours work would be far better than registering for Jobseekers Allowance (about £10 per day, not enough to run a home) when employers want younger workers.

The over 50s could help young families avoid spending so much of their salaries on childcare, and help the elderly save on some of their social services costs. This must be a choice and not compulsory. People happy to continue working must always do so, but those who prefer caring, support roles, should be given the option to work in the community instead.

However, with regard to childcare, recent Government legislation prevents older women (and men) from working in crèches, nurseries, and playgroups, and as nannies, despite years of experience with children and young people. They may have raised their own families and have lots of workplace and voluntary experience with youngsters, yet this counts for nothing. The statutory requirement is now for a Maths GCSE followed by a Diploma in Early Years care which costs around £3,000 and takes one year full time, or two years part-time to achieve (although, once qualified, practitioners will only earn the minimum wage for this essential work, but that’s another story).

In the WASPI campaign in the House of Commons in July 2017, ‘Tory MP Guy Opperman sparked audible outrage when he suggested affected women could take apprenticeships to get into employment or retraining.’ (inews.co.uk)

Childcare apprenticeships offer a low-paid experience-ignoring solution of one year placements to gain a Level 2 (GCSE equivalent) paid at just £100 per week. For older people who already have significant experience, a shorter course of six weeks to three months to bring them up to date with current practice and safeguarding issues, would be more cost effective and time saving. Unemployment is high amongst the over 50s and getting them through such training, and into the workplace needs to be done more swiftly and efficiently.

Startling a generation of women by postponing their pension entitlement until they are 65 will save the Government 5 years of pension payments. For those over 50 able to find employment when this is becoming difficult even at 40, the Government will also benefit from their taxes. The Government is also benefitting from taxes paid by working young couples (due to inadequate social housing provision and the UK high cost of living, one income will not suffice for Generation Y’s rent or mortgages). The Government is also reaping the benefit of taxes received from Early Years Childcare businesses, which have had to be set up because there are few grandparents around to assist with childcare.

The winner here is clearly the Government. The losers are ordinary families who now have scarcely any time or energy to spend with each other as everyone is too busy working, leading to family and society breakdown.

Unlike the much-respected German Hausfrau, in the UK homemakers have been regarded as ‘just housewives.’ Rather than focussing on workplace measures of success, mothers elected to bring up children; sick-nursing, cooking and cleaning, home-making and taxiing, as well as often teaching them to read and write, and generally prepare them for the world. They ran and managed their homes, and chose to spend their time creating the next generation, and caring for their working husbands too.  The 1940s idiom, ‘Behind every successful man [and child] was a great woman’, describes how the feminine support system enabled the man to come home and relax, and the children to thrive.

Their choice to be ‘backroom boys’ or invisible support systems had been made when women’s retirement age was set at 60. These housewives often returned to part-time work when their children were at school, often into low level clerical or shop work, and on generally low pay. Without prior knowledge of the Government’s surprise announcement that a further five years, and now more, of full time working was required, there was no time to plan future finances. With hindsight, no doubt many of these women would have worked more and saved more, and spent less time caring for their homes and families.

This now outdated matriarchal family model has been replaced by two working parents, both spending evenings and weekends on household management and maintenance when they need to relax and recharge after a working week, and leaving little quality free time to be intimately aware of the varying minute by minute needs of children as they change and experience their world. The subtleties and sensitivities of good parenting take time and a lot of attention.

Writing on fertility issues for today’s 25-35 year old women in The Times Supplement (5 Aug 2017), Hannah Rogers reports that young women have seen their mothers’ generation choose either to raise a family, or to pursue a career. She observes that older women are either successful and childless, or underused and underpaid carers, and writes, ‘We do not want to be either. Instead, we want to know how to be both.’ Being both is asking a lot.

Older women were undervalued when they were at school during the late 1960s and 1970s, undervalued for their roles as wives and mothers, and are now undervalued and routinely underpaid as part of the workforce. 60-65 year old women are also now picking up the tax tab, unable to claim their pensions as expected, having to remain in work, and swelling Government coffers. A major Institute for Fiscal Studies study finds that state pension reforms have saved the Treasury £5.1 billion per year, (Independent Newspaper, 1 Aug 2017) and ‘has substantially increased poverty rates, pushing them up to around 15-20 per cent.’

Traditionally, at 60, sandwiched between elderly parents and grandchildren, a woman has been expected to take on caring for both generations. No woman should feel she has no choice about being a carer but now, there really is no choice. She can’t be. The woman sandwiched in the middle has to go out to work, leaving no time during the week to fit in caring for aged or unwell parents, doing their shopping or driving them to medical appointments, and no time to look after grandchildren or help around the creche/school day. These services have to be paid for instead. Is no-one to have any time at all for families anymore? Are we really only to work and pay tax and be unable to care for our own loved ones?

Creative, responsible and autonomous as homemakers, older women may have experienced fulfilment in their caring roles. There is great joy in the caring professions, and huge reward in facilitating child development. Now, those 60-67 year old women who may wish to offer childcare support to their hard working children are denied the opportunity and are unavailable to their own grandchildren - but they’re paying more taxes. Childcare has to be paid for instead, by the children’s two working parents, who are both paying taxes. And the nursery providers are also paying taxes. Who wins in all this? The Treasury.

And who loses? Families. Parents don’t get much time with their own children. Grandparents don’t get time with their grandchildren. The elderly don’t get much time from their sandwiched middle-aged offspring.

The logic is impractical, despite the Government’s tax receipts. We have a Care Crisis.

A retired woman has time to help ease the Care Crisis; she may also have the inclination. I would go further and argue for retirement pensions at 55, or even 50, for those who choose to contribute to society in this way, by working 20-21 hours for their £155ish per week.

Women over 50 have three times been ill-served and manipulated by successive Governments, firstly by having their results deliberately and cynically tampered with, secondly as victims of low societal and career expectations, and thirdly victims of a sexist low wage culture. Now, adding further insult to these lifetime injuries, they have had their small state pensions snatched before then can even claim them. All this is criminal without considering the short sightedness of all these policies in the enormous waste of human resources. What forward thinking Government would not use the intelligence and abilities of these women? An earlier generation, working during wartime, would understand this waste of feminine ability when they were obliged to return to their kitchens at the end of WW1 and WWII. 

If they can forgive the Government for this catalogue of offences, these women over 50 may be willing to contribute to solving the Care Crisis. Those who aren’t interested can work elsewhere but women who would love to watch their grandchildren learn and grow, and to be able to support their own children who are under pressure in the workplace, or women who want to care for elderly parents, let them. Let them glue their families together. Care providers can’t do that.