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Written Question
State Retirement Pensions: Females
Monday 13th September 2021

Asked by: Zarah Sultana (Labour - Coventry South)

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment her Department has made of the potential merits of compensating women born in the 1950s who were affected by state pension increases of (a) 1995, (b) 2007 and (c) 2011.

Answered by Guy Opperman - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)

The Government decided over 25 years ago that it was going to make the State Pension age the same for men and women as a long-overdue move towards gender equality. Raising State Pension age in line with life expectancy changes has been the policy of successive administrations over many years.

In the Judicial Review on changes to State Pension age, both the High Court and Court of Appeal have supported the actions of the DWP, under successive governments dating back to 1995, finding we acted entirely lawfully and did not discriminate on any grounds.

The costs of reducing women’s State Pension age to 60 are very significant. The total additional cost if we had kept women’s SPa at 60 and men’s SPa at 65 would be in the region of £215bn for the period 2010/11 to 2025/26, in 2018/19 prices. This figure takes into account State Pension, other pensioner benefits, and savings made on working age benefits.

There is no plan to compensate anyone affected by State Pension age legislation that Parliament has enacted.