Women & Pensions

• Retired men receive an average income of £202 a week, retired women get only £161 (Department for Work and Pensions, Pensions & Incomes Series July 2001)

• More than twice as many older women as men are reliant on income support (Department for Work and Pensions, Income Support Quarterly Statistics Inquiry August 2001)

• As many as 22% of women aged 55-59 had already spent more than 25 years outside the labour market and would not reach a full pension even with full Home Responsibilities

• Protection and an otherwise complete working record. (DSS Research report 114, Building up Pension Rights)

• A third of women carers spend over 20 hours a week in unwaged caring work. (Social Focus on Women and Men ONS 1998) This caring work has been valued at £39.1 billion a year (BMA report Taking Care of the Carers 1995)

• In 1996/97 in Great Britain the average independent income received by women in retired couples was around 40% of men’s (Department of Social Security)
  
  why are women pensioners poor?
   

• Women are more likely to take on caring responsibilities and therefore have time out of the labour market which affects their entitlement to the Basic State Pension (which is calculated according to the number of years worked).

• Women are also more likely than men to be low paid and to work part-time which also affects their access to occupational pension schemes and their ability to pay into any pension scheme.

• Women have suffered because the welfare system has been geared to men’s patterns of lifetime earnings, to full-time employment with no or only very brief periods out of employment.

• The Welfare system assumed that women would be able to rely on their husband’s pensions to support them in their old age. Women were able to choose a lower rate of National Insurance Contributions (married women’s contributions) as it was assumed that they would not need to build up entitlement to benefits in their own rights. However the legacy of policies like this is that older women living alone, either through divorce or widowhood, make up the poorest pensioners1.

Basic State Pension: The BSP is a contributory benefit and is not means tested. It is payable

91% of those without a full Basic State Pension are women (Government figures given in a written answer in the House of Lords 21 July 1997). The numbers of women entitled to the full BSP is increasing, because more women are working and continue to work even after having children. Also the introduction of Home Responsibilities Protection has helped to protect entitlement to the BSP (see below)
 

Recently SERPS hit the news because of legislation passed in 1986 which would halve the amount of SERPS a widow/widower would inherit if their spouse died on or after 6th April 2000.   Although the legislative change was made in 1986, there was very little publicity about this for a long time afterwards. DSS leaflets were not updated for nearly ten years and many people believed they were misled by the Benefits Agency.  This cut would have particularly penalised older women who stayed at home to care for children and who will be reliant on their husband’s pension to provide for them in their

The S2P will replace SERPS as the State Second tier pension. It is aimed at low income earners (under £9 500) a year and has a number of features which will benefit women. For example it is aimed at low-income earners, most of whom are women. In addition the S2P allows them to be ‘credited’ into the scheme if certain conditions are fulfilled (such as caring for a child under 5 or caring for someone who is disabled for more than 35 hours a week2).
 

Aimed at low to middle income earners specifically those who earn over £9000 a year, they were introduced in April 2001. They are not state provided but available from commercial financial services

The MIG is a means tested benefit aimed at ensuring that pensioners not entitled to a full BSP receive a minimum income. The Government recently announced a welcome increase in the level of the MIG, but despite a massive government campaign to promote take up of the MIG, it is still clear that many of those who are eligible to claim are not claiming3. This may be in part due to the complexity of the claims process, but also the stigma associated with claiming means tested benefits.
 

Other sources of information

by kind permission of the The Fawcett Society, 45 Beech Street, London EC2Y 8AD  Tel 020 7628 4441 Fax 020 7628 2865 www.fawcettsociety.org.uk 
Source: Jill Insley. Copyright the Observer 10/1/99