In interviews with Professional Adviser and FT Adviser, former pensions minister Ros Altmann has painted a bleak picture of the prospects of the women’s pensions age campaign.

More revelations are emerging about the problems Baroness Ros Altmann faced during her time as pensions minister in persuading the Government to reconsider the timing of changes to women’s State pension age.

Prior to her appointment, she had supported the efforts to get the situation reviewed and has now said she attempted to do so while in office – but met opposition from higher echelons of Government.

She has told the FT Adviser that she worked “on many different strands of work” to find a solution, but “there was no hint of any recognition” from government that the matter was important.

“Therefore, I can only assume that, sadly, the government will continue to stonewall and delay any engagement, will string things out and perhaps assumes that by 2020 all these ladies will be getting some state pension so the issue will have gone away,” she said.

While some individual Conservative MPs have given WASPI their backing, Altmann told Professional Adviser: “There is absolutely no support, no money would be offered, no willingness to help at all. No conservative MPs at ministerial level would help and I needed MPs of their level to help pass new pension regulation.”

The Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) campaign maintain that rapid changes to the state pension age have placed an unfair burden on hundreds of thousands of women born in the 1950s. They are asking for the timetable to equalise state pension ages between men and women to be slowed down.

Changes to the State pension age changes were first announced in 1995 and then amended in 2011 to bring in the new pension age of 65 for women two years earlier than planned in 2018, with both men and women seeing a rise to 66 in 2020.

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