"Great strides" have been made with women’s position in society but "big divides" still remain when it comes to women’s pensions, former Pensions Minister Ros Altmann has said.

In light of International Women’s Day today, 8 March 2017, the former Pensions Minister considered the changes that still need to be made to ensure women receive better retirement incomes, equalling their male counterparts. At present “women are still very much the poor relations when it comes to pensions”, Altmann highlighted, with women being worse off when it comes to both private and state pensions.

Altmann has noted that the key areas whereby the system fails women and robs them of their retirement income involve national insurance and the state pension, auto-enrolment and social care.

While mothers are meant to gain credit for their state pension when caring for their young children, new national insurance has denied state pension rights to many. The newly made decision to deny child benefit to families where one partner earns greater than £60,000 a year results in a “side-effect of stripping many middle class women on their state pension entitlements,” Altmann argues.

“Mothers whose family income is above the limit are actually supposed to apply for the benefit anyway in order to get homecare credit for their state pension”. If women are not aware of this or discover they have lost their state pension credit, they cannot claim it back later on. Instead, new rules state that women can only backdate a claim for three months.

“Clearly the state pension is not designed with women in mind,” Altmann adds. “It’s no use saying they will be credited and then preventing them from receiving the credits with new, complex rules.”

Furthermore, it is evident that there is little space for women with part-time or multiple lower paid jobs in the pensions system. It tends to also be mothers with these working arrangements and as a result lose out on National Insurance credit.

In addition to this, it appears that auto-enrolment can be seen as penalising women in this way.

“Anyone earning less than £10,000 a year (mostly women) does not have to be automatically enrolled into a pension and will not get the benefit of their employer contribution. If they are in more than one job, but each pays below £10,000 they miss out altogether,” Altmann noted.

A final area of concern is social care. The crisis in social care is “something that hits women the hardest” Altmann claims. Due to the fact that wives, daughters and sisters are usually more likely to take on caring responsibilities and so sacrifice their own income for loved ones. As a result women are once again, less prepared to fund their own needs in retirement.

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