Pensions

It wasn't so much the notice period on levelling up the retirement age, it was that nobody was notified either directly or indirectly. Nobody was sent a letter about it. In the absence of a direct letter there was no government information campaign either. Many people had no idea they would need to wait longer for their pension.
No issue with the equalisation of the pension age at all. However many women have been disadvantaged by past structural differences in pensions legislation- the married woman's NI stamp and so on. That has been rectified to a large degree by the changes brought in in 2016, but it will still take a few decades before everyone who retires gets a full pension based on contributing for 35 years.

 

I think they need to have this discussion with the public. I realise they could not pay out straight away out of the investment but you have to start somewhere.

 

You are correct about the lack of ring fencing. People sometimes assume they have their own state pension pot, but the years of contributions is just a shorthand way of measuring whether you qualify.
State pensions paid now are funded by general taxation, not by a mythical pot of money. National Insurance is a tax with another name.

 

Reading this prompted me to get a pension forecast. I'm due the full whack in (mumble mumble) years...
What is strange however the fact that my Nat Ins contributions has a whole year missing. I wish I could look back and say that I enjoyed my year off but I didn't have one.

 

Well it would only be women who were affected as they were the only people whose pension age was being increased- aside from the change from 65 to 66.
I am unclear why you think it is fine to make massive changes to someone's retirement income with no attempt to tell them about it.
It was a short sighted approach. It caused a lot of issues, handling an Ombudsman enquiry is very labour intensive and dealing with it from a policy perspective still trundles on today.
There are also costs in paying people Pension Credit who have insufficient income.
At least the communication issue is acknowledged now in government.

 

It probably won't make any difference but I would query your missing year. You never know when they might change the number of qualifying years you might need. They've changed it before!

 

You say only women are effected and then acknowledged that everyone has been effected. So therefore if you are saying women should have had a personalised letter surely everyone should have?

it isn’t that they didn’t inform people, just they didn’t send letters to everyone. Leaflets and adverts etc were done and it was covered by the press. Even the onbundsman said that their communication was ok up to 2004, so the first ten years.

 

The leaflets were minimal (and not very good) and there was no advertising campaign.

DWP had research findings that showed a significant number of people were unaware of the change to 65 but did not do a huge amount about it.
The strand of DWP work around pensions education and information got crowded out and to a degree overtaken by the much bigger and sexier (in pensions terms!) project of automatic enrolment into private pensions. I know as I worked on both of these projects.

I agree that everyone should have been told about the change in time to take action, how that's done effectively is difficult. On the change from 65 to 66 there was very little time for people to adjust, including some who had already taken early retirement expecting their pension. That was daylight robbery in my view.

 

If you are aged between 45 and 70 it is worth your while to look at this.

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/voluntary-national-insurance-contributions/

 

So the moving of my wife's retirement age from 60 years old to 66 years old was a figment of our imagination. This was a crime against women. This cost us approximately £ 50k.

I worked until I was 69yo. I paid tax, latterly at 40%, NI and also paid into a private pension from the age of 23.

The government try change the rules ad-hoc to suit their overspends on their political aspirations.