AT the beginning of this month the petitions committee, which I chair, scheduled a debate on a petition asking the Government to make transitional state pension arrangements for women born in the 1950s.

It was the best attended debate I have ever seen in Westminster Hall with many MPs unable to get a seat.

Why the interest?

It was because many of these women have been dealt with unjustly and been forced into poverty as a result.

In 1995 a Pensions Act was passed to equalise the state pension age at 65 for men and women.

No-one objects to that but the Department of Work and Pensions did not even begin to write to the women affected until 2009 so some did not know about the change which was to be implemented between 2016 and 2020.

‘There are things the Government could do to help them and I set out some in the debate’ Helen Jones MP To make matters worse, in 2011, the Tory-led government passed another Pensions Act, increasing the pension age to 66 for everyone by 2020 and speeding up the increase to 65 for women to 2018 rather than 2020.

When notifications were sent out they were not finished until 2013, giving some people only two or three years to prepare for a change in their retirement date.

Some clearly did not receive notice at all, some received forecasts of their retirement date which were wrong.

As a result, there are women who have retired to care for sick or elderly relatives, or taken early retirement because they were ill, thinking that they would have to wait only a year or two for their state pension and now finding they have to wait much longer.

There are things the Government could do to help them and I set out some in the debate. Yet the first step is to admit that things went wrong when the changes to pension age were speeded up and that people took decisions based on wrong information.

So far the Government has refused to do this yet millions of women are affected.

It is time they were listened to.