MADAM,

With a general election coming up, all of the parties and candidates need to address one vital issue before anything else; that of 1950s women’s lack of state pensions.

Theresa May needs to listen to her sixty-something peers, not the kakistocracy of civil servants and pensions ministers with whom she surrounds herself. 3.4 million 1950s women have been denied their pensions at age 60 and anyone born after 1953 has had a massive hike of up to six years added, without any notice or warning. If you take the wider families, this adds up to a huge amount of votes. 

This is not about equalisation or EU directives, it is purely and simply a money grab by the departing George Osbourne. Something he boasted about at the 2013 IMF Finance Ministers meeting in May 2013. “The savings made from raising the pension age for women dwarfs almost everything else you can do. It was one of the least controversial things we have done." Well it’s controversial now! That’s a lot of voters to convince with a manifesto pledge and all main parties have had a hand in the grossly unjust way they have added years onto our working lives despite 45 years of NIC.

It was poor, rushed legislation without any checks and balances of how it would affect these women, many of whom are divorced, single or widowed and have no other income.  We’re tired, we can’t get jobs in our early sixties and giving us our pensions would free up jobs, child care for grandchildren, and elderly care responsibilities which are currently soaking up local council funding. ’63 is the new 60’ Facebook group are asking the government (any new government) to meet us half way at age 63 to restore birthdate as the trigger for pension date. It’s long enough after working since we were 15 or 16, often in manual or heavy jobs.

Our local parliamentary candidate, David T C Davies, is fully aware of this proposal and kindly got it costed for me by the Parliamentary Library Statistics office, but on every debate about this issue in Parliament, he has voted against with the Party rather than his conscience. He may have a huge majority in Monmouthshire, and for other policies rightly so, but on this issue, the Conservatives as well as Lib-Dems and Labour stand to lose hundreds of thousands of votes unless they agree to address this gross injustice. 

Mariana Robinson

(Llandogo)