Shameless Waspi women don’t have a leg to stand on

Although the averages are brought down considerably by the high rates of infant and child mortality then prevalent, with those life expectancies, many still never reached retirement age. Those making it would expect to live on post-work for perhaps only a few years, not the decades that are the norm today.

With longer female life expectancy, the reduction of the pension age for women was palpably unfair even at the time. The usual explanation for the move is a practical, utilitarian one.

Most women then married slightly older men – and the difference would enable husbands and wives to leave work at roughly the same time and enjoy retirement together, however short it might be.

As the UK moved through successive post-war generations and the sexes reaped the benefits of a greater degree of equality, the gender gap in age at marriage gradually diminished. (The average difference at first marriage now stands at around a year and a half – 32.7 for men and 31.2 for women).

Outdated policies tend to live on long after passing their use by date. Only in 1995, did John Major’s government finally take the plunge and announce that retirement ages would be equalised by 2020. Then in 2011, the Cameron government moved this date forward to 2018 and announced that the state pension age would gradually start rising for all from 2020.

So where does the alleged inequality come in? The campaigners argue that women born in the 1950s were insufficiently warned that they would receive the state pension later than they had been expecting.

They received some backing for this claim last year when the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman reported on the issue. It found that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) had inadequately informed some women about the change in the state pension age.

But its findings are rather more nuanced than the campaigners suggest.

The report finds that the DWP did what it should in informing women of the change in retirement age up to 2004: “Between 1995 and 2004, DWP’s communication of changes to state pension age reflected the standards we would expect it to meet. Accurate information was publicly available through DWP’s agencies, pension education campaigns, leaflets and website.”

In other words, far from covering it up, it was doing its very best to publicise the change.

Where the criticism comes in is that research in 2004 showed that news of the changes were “not reaching the people who needed it most”, and after that point, the DWP did not do enough to reach these women. How such a narrow finding can possibly justify the campaigners’ demand for blanket compensation for all 3.8 million women born in the 1950s is a mystery.

And even if it were not for the DWP’s information campaign, would they really have a case? The changes to the state pension age were hardly a secret. They were announced to Parliament and then legislation, the Pensions Act 1995, had to go through all its stages in the Commons and the Lords.

Now, I acknowledge my habit of reading Hansard as a leisure activity has for some unfathomable reason not become a widespread pastime. But this was front page news. It led radio and TV news for a prolonged period. It was the subject of endless broadcast discussions.

Clearly planning on the basis of one set of rules, and then those rules changing, is far from ideal. But the change of rules was rectifying a clear, and under sex discrimination laws possibly illegal, injustice.

By 1995, the realisation that the cost of state pensions was rapidly becoming unaffordable could no longer be ignored, and this was one glaring oddity that could be rectified whilst also saving money. Much tougher choices will certainly follow in the coming years.

For those facing hardship, I have every sympathy. But in this era of the clearly unaffordable triple lock, the needs of pensioners are being far from overlooked.

It is hard to think of a less justified campaign for blanket state compensation. The Waspi women have not been wronged.