Rectify this unfair pension-age rule

THIS is an open letter to the Prime Minister.

In your conference speech this year, you said you believed in “A Conservatism of fairness and justice and opportunity for all. A Conservatism that keeps the British Dream alive for a new generation.”

A rallying call, but shouldn’t you first be addressing the huge injustice metered out to 1950s-born women by constantly moving their state pension age?

The previous Chancellor’s greed has well and truly shattered their dreams? It feels to the 3.4million women affected by these changes that you have ignored the moral contract we had as young people that we would retire at 60. Many have worked since they were 15-years-old, and stand to lose around £45,000 each, yet your government still insists that it will not look at this again.

Several pieces of bad legislation in 1995, 2007, 2011 and 2014 state pension Acts have interwoven a massive financial impact on these women, without any care or thought for their welfare. To have your state pension moved by up to six years, with no notice is not just and it’s not fair. To find that you paid into a system all your working life, then not receive your expected pension has left hundreds of thousands of families in dire

financial circumstances – yet your government will not look at this again?

Sweeping this amount of 1950s women, most less fortunate than yourself, less able to have had well paid careers because of family commitments in their lives, should not be penalised in favour of a new generation. We are the group that have paid.

I urge you, Prime Minister, to discuss with your Chancellor a means to rectify the complicated rules which are now causing hardship for these women without their pensions, in his forthcoming budget.

We all agree that equalisation of gender age for state pension is a good thing. It is the means by which your government, and previous governments, have tried to achieve this aim, without proper notice, which is at fault here.

Why should women only be discriminated against in order to achieve equalisation of age?

Have we not suffered enough in our long working lives with sexist remarks, harassment in the workplace, the gender pay gap (currently 14.1% some forty years after legislation), not allowed to join work pension schemes in the 1970s, and now we are being discriminated again by not receiving our state pensions when expected?

Please look at the very reasonable proposal put forward by the “63 is the new 60” campaign group as a compromise, in order that this injustice can at least be in some way acknowledged and rectified.

If you fail to do anything at all, then your own British Dream of being a long serving Prime Minister will certainly be at an end and your undertaking to tackle injustice where you find it will ring very hollow indeed.

Mariana Robinson Monmouth