Justice, please

My thanks to Christine Jardine MP (Perspective, 1 October) for her piece on the plight of the 1950s-born women given little or no notice of retirement age increases and the breakdown of the social contract.

To be clear, we WASPIS do not oppose equality (although it was never a level playing field to start with), it is the unjust and disdainful way in which it was originally implemented, compounded by a second increase which affects us and our families deeply.

We were a soft target for an over-ambitious Chancellor with an austerity obsession. Forget the selective newspaper ads and “some women’s journals”, the point is the government department responsible, the DWP, had a duty of care to officially inform us. They didn’t. An FOI request indicates little evidence of an orchestrated attempt other than notices in Jobcentres. I’d never been in one, personally. Many professions do not use them to find staff.

The Government’s autocratic unwillingness to listen or communicate with women on the matter, yet duplicitously communicate on every public forum – giving misleading information about the methods used to inform us, spouting the spurious figure of £77 billion to put it right and claiming to have already spent £1.1bn on us to lessen the blow – indicates nothing short of disdain and I wonder how many other groups would have been treated in this way.

This figure of £1.1bn represents the shortfall, not money spent. The Treasury made £30bn out of these increases instead of an expected £31.5bn when, I am told, they knocked six months off to ensure they got the 2011 Pensions Act through Parliament.

ANDREA GREGORY Meadowfield Terrace, Edinburgh