Women in lower-grade occupations forced to work up to six years longer because of changes to the state pension age are a third more likely to suffer debilitating, potentially permanent, depression, research has found.
The changes to the state pension age (SPA) have also resulted in a widening gap in health between women from different occupations, according to a paper by academics at King’s College London.
“Our research is important because we know that worsening mental health will lead to higher healthcare costs, higher use of disability benefits and greater use of health services. Worsening mental health also leads to lower economic productivity and reduced ability to participate in life,” said Dr Ludovico Carrino, who co-authored the research paper with Prof Karen Glaser and Prof Mauricio Avendano, also from King’s College London.
Published on Wednesday in the academic journal Health Economics, the research is the first in-depth analysis of the impact of the reform on women born after March 1950 in the UK.
Carrino and Glaser used data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study to look at 3,531 women affected by the changes in specific employment sectors, comparing them with women unaffected by the changes who were born slightly earlier or slightly later and worked in the same professions.
The jobs with the worst mental health outcomes include housekeeping, restaurant services, personal care, sales, cleaning and jobs requiring the operation of machinery.
“We think that our research calls for alternative interventions to help these workers and prevent them suffering these harmful consequences,” Carrino said . “For example, policies that could promote flexible working in older age when people are close to SPA, might help to facilitate transition to retirement.”
Almost 4 million women born in the 1950s lost their pensions when the pension age was raised from 60 to 66 between 2010 and 2018. Many women only found out that their pension age had increased when they applied to draw it, or shortly before.
The campaign group BackTo60 took the government to court last year. They lost their case but were granted the right to appeal on all grounds and will return to court in July.
Michael Mansfield QC, who represented the group in court, said: “The impact on the economic, social and mental wellbeing of these women, who rightly enjoyed a perfectly legitimate expectation of satisfactory provision in retirement, has been devastating.
“The extent of individual distress and hardship is only now becoming evident. It is deeply ironic that all of this is done in the name of equalisation and equality, when the very means employed to achieve this are themselves discriminatory.”
A 2018 survey of 20,704 women by BackTo60 found that 60% felt that the level of stress the changes had caused would impact on their longevity, 40% had had feelings of suicide as a direct result of changes to their pension and 12% had engaged in self-harm.
Joanne Welch, of the group, said: “It is no surprise that many women born in the 1950s are depressed and suicidal. These abandoned women are a subclass, whose wellbeing was sabotaged by the changes to SPA.”
A Department for Work and Pensions spokesperson said: “The government decided more than 20 years ago that it was going to make the state pension age the same for men and women as a long-overdue move towards gender equality, and this has been clearly communicated. We need to raise the age at which all of us can draw a state pension so it is sustainable now and for future generations.”
