Insch woman forced by ill health to retire praises Richard Thomson MP for pressing WASPI compensation case for women who were never told of delay to their pension date
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AN Insch woman has said how impressed she is by the efforts of MP Richard Thomson who has called on the UK Government to start the process of issuing compensatory payments to the Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) affected by the changes to their state pensions.
Deirdre Macdonald was born in 1955 and says that with her friends of the same age, she pursued a career in the expectation of retiring at 60.
Ms Macdonald said: "To this day, I have never yet been informed that this would no longer apply.
"I worked in the public sector throughout my career and health dictated I take early retirement at 63 years in spite of not achieving state pension age until 66 years.
"I was lucky. I was a member of the LGPScheme. I had the choice to invest the lump sum element in setting up a micro business. Having that choice meant I was able to retire before my health deteriorated. Without the LGPScheme, I would have had to force myself to work. The reality of that would probably have been many elongated periods of ill health. My whole adult life with my slightly older friends, we all worked in our careers in the expectation of retiring at 60 years.
"This was a life - changing change in legislation that was never and still hasn't been communicated to those women affected. This is a dereliction of several governments' duties towards the many thousands of women like me born in the 1950s. This needs to be rectified before more women end the struggle they face, having not had warning or time to plan their finances.
"Women have lost their lives, some have taken their lives, others have had to sell their homes and become homeless. I am hugely impressed by Richard Thomson and from past experience he is very good at pursuing issues for constituents."
Last year, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, condemned the UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for “maladministration” in relation to changes to women’s state pensions.
Ms Macdonld has welcomed the statement by the Ombudsman which she says is the first acknowledgement that something unfair happened.
She said: "Now we need a gradual scale of compensation to take account of the delay. What has happened just is not fair and I often ask myself, if this had affected men, would it have happened?"
Research carried out for the WASPI campaign shows nearly quarter of a million women will have died waiting for pension compensation by the end of this year.
Mr Thomson has written to Pensions Minister Guy Opperman asking him to start the process of implementing compensatory payments, or interim payments, to those affected.
Mr Thomson said: “I continue to receive regular approaches from constituents on the injustice they are suffering because of the UK Government’s maladministration, which has already been confirmed by the Parliamentary Ombudsman.
“Detailed analysis has now been carried out for the WASPI campaign which concludes with the shocking statistic that 220,190 women will have died in the seven years since the campaign started to get women born in the 1950s compensation for failures to inform them about the pension age moving from 60 to 66.
“It is estimated that the UK Government will save something in the order of £3.8billion on compensation likely to be awarded as a result of this particularly grim statistic.
“I’m therefore asking the Pensions Minister to do the decent thing and start the process now of putting in place compensatory payments – or even interim payments – before more of the women affected pass away.”
