Leader: 'Pensions must be reformed, but fairly'

THERE is something cruelly familiar about today's warning that thousands of Edinburgh women face seeing their retirement plans ruined by a Coalition Government U-turn on protecting state pensions.

It is not that the details of the decision to abruptly fast-track changes to the retirement age for women are fresh in our minds - a lack of publicity, as city MP Mark Lazarowicz points out, means many of us didn't even know.

It is the fact that yet again it is women and not men getting the roughest deal on pensions. And especially those who have spent years either in relatively low-paid jobs or at home caring for children or elderly relatives.

The worst affected on this occasion will be women aged 57 and 58, many of whom will have to wait until they are 66 to get their state pension, up to two years later than the Coalition had promised.

We all know women are already punished for the sacrifices they often make for their families by the existing system.

Official estimates suggest many who take time out from work for family reasons are up to 40 a week worse off by rules that base pension payments on National Insurance contributions.

Work and Pensions Secretary Ian Duncan-Smith aims to change this unfair set-up with his plans for a 140-a-week flat-rate universal retirement payment.

Those reforms should be welcomed, not just for ironing out this anomaly between the sexes, but because they will clear out much of the costly bureaucracy within the current over-complex system.

But what the Coalition hopes to give with one hand, it is taking away with another, for an estimated 5000 women in the Capital.

Most of them accept the need to reform an increasingly unaffordable pensions system and to cut back on public spending in general.

But they will reasonably have expected more time to adjust their plans to any changes affecting them.

These savings should not come at the cost of basic fairness.