The increase to women’s retirement age left them at a “huge disadvantage”, campaigners say.
“They simply didn’t know and didn’t have time to make alternative arrangements,” Debbie de Spon, a member of Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi), tells the BBC.
As we’ve been reporting, a law was passed in 1995 setting out a timetable to eventually raise the retirement age for women from 60 to 65 so it would be the same as men.
The original plan was to phase those changes in between 2010 and 2020, but the coalition government accelerated the shift in 2011 in a bid to reduce the cost of the state pension system to the taxpayer.
It meant the new higher retirement age for women was brought forward to 2018. It was then raised again to 66 for both men and women in 2020.
“It’s not that we’re opposed to the increase in the state pension age, it’s just that lack of notice was a disaster for Waspi women,” de Spon says.