DWP ‘still has mountain to climb’ on fixing state pension errors
Pensions & benefits Personal finance Impact
Today’s figures from DWP show welcome progress in fixing state pension errors, with a running total of £497 million having been paid out to 82,323 pensioners in respect of errors to widows, married women and the over 80s.
This compares with a total of £324m paid out to just over 50,000 pensioners as at end March 2023, as reported in the DWP’s latest annual report. The final total amount due to be paid, according to DWP is £1.17bn to around 170,000 pensioners.
The table below shows the latest totals:
However, as well as the hundreds of millions still to be paid out to widows in particular, the latest DWP annual report also owned up to a *further* £1 billion in underpayments to around 187,000 parents, mostly mothers. This arises from errors in recording protection for time at home with children (‘Home Responsibilities Protection’) on large numbers of National Insurance records.
Although HMRC has recently started a programme of writing out to those who have potentially missed out on HRP, very few of those who have missed out have so far received what they are due. It is likely to take several years to reach all of those affected by this separate error.
Commenting, Steve Webb, partner at LCP said:
“The process of correcting state pension errors began nearly three years ago but still only around half of the money owed has been paid. Worse still, when DWP recently decided to do the first proper checks on state pensions in years, they identified another £1 billion in underpayments and work has barely begun on fixing those errors. DWP still has a mountain to climb when it comes to paying all pensioners the amount they are due. It is a sorry chapter in the history of the Department when well over 1,000 civil servants have had to spend years painstakingly fixing state pension errors which should have been picked up much sooner. And it is a tragedy that tens of thousands of elderly women have died without ever receiving the money they were due. It is vital that the process of fixing these errors continues to accelerate and that measures are taken to prevent the reoccurrence of such large-scale underpayments”