MADAM,

I am one of those women caught in the unfair pension reforms trap and paying a heavier price than my contemporaries because I was born in February 1954.  I have had a dialogue with my MP, David Davies, (Monmouthshire) for some months now and have seen him at his surgery in Monmouth about this issue.  Many readers will know that the WASPI campaign (Woman Against State Pension Inequality) has been hitting the headlines recently and no less than five debates have taken place in Parliament with cross-party support for women born in the 1950s who have been treated unfairly.

No-one in the WASPI campaign is against age equalisation, it is the speeded pace at which this group have been targeted in the 2011 Act that is at fault.

David Davies has been a good MP for Monmouth on the whole. He’s helped me with cross border health issues and before that, with education and health issues for my son. But when you see your MP, and he confirms that on the evidence produced that the government needs to look again at the transitional arrangements for state pension transitions for women in my age group, one is quite rightly astonished when he votes ‘no’ with the government for the motion put forward to review the inequality last Wednesday, after considerable debate.

So when we vote for an MP, we hope that he/ she will firstly represent the majority of the electorate in his/ her constituency. We do not expect him to say one thing and then vote the other way in support of his party.

I hope David Davies is really ashamed of his actions at the debate last week. I have voted for him for all of the years that he has been Monmouthshire’s MP, but never again. I really feel let down on this issue. He has all the personal facts about how I’ve had no less than five different state pension dates from the DWP in the last ten years and how my contemporaries at school all retire at different times, some this year. But I have to wait until July 2019, a full five and a half years longer than expected, even though I’ve paid National Insurance for more than forty years.

It is unfair and morally wrong that this contract between an individual and the government has been broken and David Davies knows this, so does the party to which he belongs. 

Mariana Robinson

(Monmouth)