THE same issue has been dominating my work in both the constituency and in parliament over the last week or so.

The Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) campaign has been filling my inbox, with scores of women in their 50s urging me to attend next month’s Westminster Hall debate automatically triggered by the number of signatories to the online petition.

As a member of the cross-party Department for Work and Pensions Select Committee, this is an argument with which I am extremely familiar and on which a great many MPs are already working hard.

My committee has been investigating how this situation came about and, last month, I chaired a hearing at which WASPI came to Parliament to give evidence.

Although the coalition government adjusted the age upwards in 2011, the principle of women retiring at the same time as men in fact first became law in 1995.

At the time, every woman who stood to be affected should have received a letter outlining the changes. However, as WASPI (and my own postbag and surgeries) have demonstrated, a lot of people either did not receive the letter or did not have the advice they needed at the time to interpret the impact on them so that they could make the necessary plans.

Poor quality information put out by successive governments has turned what should have been a planned long-term transition into an apparent bombshell for many women.

The challenge now is to square the expressed will of parliament over 20 years with the needs of women who have become aware too late to avoid being disadvantaged by it.