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Hello and welcome to Coffeyers Schultz. I'm Michael Simmons and I'm joined by Isabel Hardman and the host of the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast Louise Perry. So yesterday there was an announcement that a report had found that this particular group of

campaigners called the Waspie women were due some compensation from the government.

Isabel could you start us off with who are these people, what are they campaigning for?

Yeah, so this is the change to the state pension age that was made in 1995.

Since the 1940s, the retirement age for women had been 60 years old.

But obviously this was raised to much men and it was not communicated properly to women from 2005.

So I think the problem with this is that women had got used to there being a set retirement age

and thought there was no reason to check that that might change.

It's a bit like, you know, everyone is used to the fact that you can take your

driving test once you hit 17 or something, you know, there was sort of these set ages where things

happened and so there was a public information campaign that was needed. The

Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, which is a quite ridiculous name, I think,

which is a service that investigates maladministration within public services. This is the ombudsman's carried out a lengthy investigation into this

injustice and found that after 2005 the Department of Work and Pensions

was not properly communicating to these women affected by this state pension age change

that they were not going to get their state pension once they hit 60. and so this went that these women were in the dark

and made plans for the wrong retirement age and it's turned into a very very big campaign that's lasted two decades, known at

women against state pension inequality, Waspi for short.

...