Victory for womens state pension rights
Under new proposals announced by the government literally hundreds of thousands of women in the UK will be able to receive a full state pension upon retirement. The group of the population in question are those who gave up their careers to care for children or family members and because they did not have sufficient National Insurance contributions they had not been allowed to claim the full state pension.
Under current legislation those who may would miss out were able to contribute to 6 years back NI but under the new plan this will be increased by a further 6 years. When you consider that only one third of women receive a full state pension at retirement age, with the rest receiving a heavily discounted amount, it has turned into something of a national scandal.
There will also be a change to the number of NI years needed to qualify for a full pension which will be reduced from 39 years down to 30 years. It seems rather odd in many ways that the UK government is now looking to pull more and more people into the state pension at a time when it is under serious pressure and has in fact been falling in real terms for some time.
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