In 2013 my life began to eat itself. In 2012 I’d taken voluntary redundancy from a demanding job to spend time with my father, dying of lung cancer. I knew I did not have enough money in my small pension to keep me going if I lived to be 83 – the average life expectancy for a woman in the UK – and I planned to go into part-time work to earn enough to keep me going while I wrote a book I’d had commissioned. Writing was… is… my retirement plan. The devil in my plan was hiding in the thumping great detail that at 58, in London, I was apparently unemployable. I began an enthusiastic job search two weeks after Dad died but six months and over 500 applications later, anxiously watching as my savings dwindled to nothing and supplementing my more or less non-existent diet with nicked buns from meetings at the House of Commons, I was forced to rethink my options.
A large part of my doubtful future is down to the 1995 Pensions Act, which mostly concerned itself with company pension schemes but included a clause stating that there should be a phasing in of equalisation in state pension ages for men (who retired at 65) and women (who then retired at 60). No one had, or has, a problem with this. A problem does arise in the fact that very little was done about “phasing” anything and that includes notifying the women affected. In 2011 the coalition government accelerated the changes to a retirement age for women of 65 in 2018 and then to 66 in 2020, allowing most women no time to make changes to plans that had often been in place for decades. For 1950s women, retirement has become a little like chasing a mirage – you can see it but you can’t touch it.
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