‘I lost £35k in pension lottery’
WASPI campaigner Hilary Simpson believes she has lost around £35,000 in a birthday lottery which finally ended last week.
Hilary, 66, runs the Cheltenham branch of Women Against State Pension Injustice and says she is determined to fight on because she only found that the state pension age had gone up in 2009 when she handed in her notice.
Although she is determined not to be seen as a martyr, looking after disabled daughter Ellie had been such a strain that she hoped to retire early from her local government job at the age of 55.
But it came as a shock to find out that the pension age had gone up from 60 as part of plans to equalise men and women’s retirement ages.
“I had been caring for a severely disabled child at home as well as working, and this had taken its toll,” she said.
“I knew that retiring early would mean that my local government pension would be actuarially reduced, but I decided to go ahead.
“I had factored in a number of things, including the fact that I believed I would start to receive my state pension at the age of 60. I requested a state pension forecast online, and it was only at that point that I realised that I would not receive my state pension until I was 63.
“It was too late to change my retirement arrangements so I went ahead.”
Then in January 2012, when she had already been retired for almost three years, she was notified that her state pension age had been delayed again, this time to September 2019.
Hilary eventually started to receive her state pension last year, at the age of 65 years and five months, well over five years later than she had originally expected.
Thanks to the pension lottery her husband John, who is only six months older, received his state pension almost a year earlier and a school friend, who is also six months older received hers 18 months before her.
“The whole thing was truly a birthdate lottery,” she said.
“I estimate that I have lost out on at least £35,000.”
Like many other women born after April 1953, she says she did not get any personal notification of the 1995 changes which paved the way for women’s pensions to be increased from 60 back then to 66 this week.
“I cannot believe that people can take such a fundamental decision that affects so many people’s lives and not tell them about it,” she said.
“I have spoken to so many women who say they would have arranged their lives so differently if they had known.
“It’s not as if I was tucked way on some remote desert island. Part of my job was HR and I read the newspapers every day on the bus in the way into work. I was in touch with what was going on in the world.
“Even the Government’s own website said the retirement age for women was 60 for quite some time after it was changed. This was people’s retirement and they did not tell them and that’s why I feel very strongly about it.
“Years ago if you had told me that I would not be aware of a change like this, I would not have believed you.
“I was well informed and the type of person to put any official letters away. I wasn’t one of those scatty people who loses things.”
Government ministers have been said to be overheard saying that “women’s pensions were the easiest money the Treasury ever made” and “ignore them and they will go away”. That has made her even more determined to carry on the fight.
“I think women in their 60s are marginalised because the media don’t know what to do with us,” she said.
“Women our age are problematic because we don’t sit easily within the modern stereotypes. We are not young enough to be influential or old enough to be seen as vulnerable.
“They would like us to be meek and mild, to be good girls. It’s very unsettling when we act in a way that is different to what people are expecting”
There are several main campaign groups and only BackTo60 is fighting for full restitution but this has been turned down by judges in the High Court who say there is no evidence of discrimination.
As the women affected started to die off, others fought for other forms of financial compensation but their demands for early access or a bridging pension seems less relevant now most of the original cohort have retired.
A burning sense of injustice keeps Hilary fighting.
“There is an element of wanting a public acknowledgement and an apology but that would be a hollow victory without some sort of financial compensation,” said Hilary.
“Even those of us who have a pension now have been left out of pocket. I know of people who have remortgaged or sold their houses or used their savings. We need to push for some sort of compensation.
“I wasn’t on the poverty line but before I had my pension I went without things I would have bought if I had had it.
“The first thing I bought was a new computer because I had been struggling with an old one for such a long time. I wasn’t living off baked beans but for a lot of women it really was breadline stuff.”
A year ago this week mum-of-two
Hilary was one of the women who lobbied Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester and is determined to carry on.
But although she believes Boris Johnson is hiding behind bluster, she says the issue is not party political because all parties have had a hand in raising the pension age.
“As far as 1950s women goes, they all have blood on their hands,” said Hilary.