I have to declare an interest at the outset, because I am a WASPI woman. I'm a woman unfairly affected by state pension age changes and one of the Women Against State Pension Inequality.

In 1995, the then Conservative Government introduced a new Pensions Act that would have raised the age of retirement for women to 65—the same age as men—by 2025. This would have given women 15 years to change their retirement plans; 15 more years of savings to help meet the shortfall in their pension funds. However, the Conservative and Lib Dem coalition Government changed these plans. The Pensions Act 2011 sped up the changes, meaning that women’s state pension age would increase from 63 in 2016 to 65 in November this year. The Act also stated that both men and women’s state pension age should increase to 66 by 2020.

I, like thousands of my compatriots, was not personally notified of the changes. I received no letter, I received no explanation, and no-one told me my retirement plans would have to change.

But unlike many other women in this situation, I am fortunate, I am still in employment and I am not facing destitution. Sadly, many women have been badly affected by these changes, and I have read of at least one women who took her own life as a result of the financial black hole she found herself in.

Nobody disagrees that men and women's retirement ages shouldn't be the same. However, these changes shouldn't have been introduced without decades of notice, years to plan, and time to make additional financial arrangements. As it stands, the changes to women's pensions were introduced too fast and too haphazardly.

I only learnt of the changes via an offhand remark from one of my friends who delivers parcels. She told me that she was looking forward to becoming part-time delivering parcels because her legs were not what they used to be. And she was going to go part-time. Unfortunately, due to these changes, she'd now found she had to deliver parcels for a further six years on a full-time basis. So, that's how I found out. And women are being made to suffer because of a lack of foresight and planning by successive UK Governments.

Unfortunately, we can't correct past mistakes, but we can mitigate the effects those mistakes are having on women born in the 1950s. Twelve months ago in this Chamber, I brought forward a motion calling for a bridging pension that supplies an income until state pension age, which is not means-tested; compensation for the absence of a bridging pension to those women who have already reached their state pension age; compensation to all of those who have not started to receive a bridging pension by an appropriate date, which would be sufficient to recover lost monetary interest; and compensation to the beneficiaries of the estates of those who are deceased and failed to receive a bridging pension. Therefore, I call on the Welsh Government to demand justice from the UK Government. We owe it to thousands of Welsh women, women who have paid their dues, to pay them their state pension. [Applause.]