Historic Direct Discrimination Against Men

by Les May

A FEW MONTHS before my wife reached the age of 60 the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) wrote to her with all the necessary paperwork to allow her to claim her State Retirement Pension (SRP), which she received the week following her birthday. When I was 65 I received no paperwork from the DWP and had to ask for it. The week following my birthday I got nothing, so I wrote again and got an apology, but still no pension.  I wrote again asking for my pension and for the interest I had lost due to the late payments. I eventually got the pension, but was asked to prove that it would have been into an interest bearing account. It was and I received a £30 payment for the trouble I had been caused.  I estimate that I ‘lost’ about £35,000 by having to wait until I was 65.  My experience of dealing with the DWP suggest that it can reasonably be said to be guilty of institutional sexism.

You will perhaps understand that I have zero sympathy for the women behind the Backto60 campaign who are complaining that the State Pension Age (SPA) for women should still be 60 as it was from the 1940s until April 2010.  The Pensions Act 1995 provided for the SPA for women to increase from 60 to 65 over the period April 2010 to 2020.  These changes were announced in 1995 i.e. 15 years before they were to be implemented.  Don’t confuse these women with the so called Waspi women who are complaining that this process of raising the SPA for women has been accelerated for the period after 2016 when it was 63.

Last week two judges of the High Court, Lord Justice Irwin and Mrs Justice Whipple, dismissed a case brought by two women ‘on all grounds’ saying: ‘There was no direct discrimination on grounds of sex, because this legislation does not treat women less favourably than men in law. Rather it equalises a historic asymmetry between men and women, and thereby corrects historic direct discrimination against men’. (my emphasis)

Oh dear!  Oh dear!  This isn’t how equality between men and women is supposed to work is it?

However things are not quite what they seem and having to work longer may have its compensations after all.  Men born before 6 April 1951 and women born before 6 April 1953 receive a SRP of £129.20. To get the full basic State Pension a total of 30 qualifying years of National Insurance contributions or credits are needed.  Men born on or after 6 April 1951 and women born on or after 6 April 1953 receive a SRP of £168.60, i.e. £39.40 more!   The downside that to get the full basic State Pension a total of 35 qualifying years of National Insurance contributions or credits are needed, but some SRP is payable to people with 10 qualifying years.

The fact that even though the changes were announced 15 years before they were implemented, some women are claiming that they knew nothing about them, illustrates that in general people do not understand the benefits system they support through their taxes and at sometime in their life may be beneficiaries of.  But ignorance does not seem to deter some people from seeing anyone who is ‘on benefits’ as a ‘scrounger’.

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