Stroud District Council recently passed a motion in support of the WASPI women.

WASPI stands for Women Against State Pension Inequality and this campaign has now been running for some years a legacy of successive governments raising the pension age for women and failing to inform and support those women who have collectively lost millions of pounds in the process.

Now no one pretends that previous retirement ages were immutable and that the government did not face serious financial consequences as life expectancies increased and the post war baby boomers came through to retirement.

However many believe that the way in which these changes were implemented were sneaky and without due consideration of the impact on women in general and specifically those who incurred hardship in later life because of lost pensionable years, illness, widowhood, paying the lower stamp, or divorce.

At the core of the WASPI demands is that arrangements for the move to the same retirement age as for men should have been subject to transitional measures rather than the cliff edge that they have become.

This should have included a bridging scheme to mitigate the worst aspects of the reforms.

No one is pretending that you can turn the clock back but the way in which some have been punished through no fault of their own is thoroughly unjust.

What makes the situation even worse is the way those affected have been doubly disadvantaged through the loss of passported benefits.

Whilst I realise that men as well as women have lost out through later eligibility to bus passes and winter fuel allowance the impact has been particularly harsh on women born in the 1950s because of the legislative change made in 1995.

The recent decision to further bring forward the date of the rise in the pension age to 68 has just exacerbated anger and the feelings of unfairness.

I believe that the WASPI cause is totally genuine.

I recently attended an All Party meeting of MPs including Conservatives who are pledged to do something about this situation.

As a result of that we will be bringing forward a Presentation Bill later in the year in the hope that the Government will rethink its approach and look at lessening the worst aspects of pension age inequality.

Sometimes politics is not just about looking to the future but making good the damage of history.