Are you entitled to an AOW benefit? DWP makes a 78-year-old wait almost a year

A 78-year-old was stuck in the state pension corrections queue for almost a year and was repeatedly fobbed off by government workers.

Christine Plant, pictured right, received confirmation by letter of a 16-year gap in her records but continued to go around in circles with HMRC and the Department for Work and Pensions.

This also applies to a three-hour telephone conversation that she describes as ‘terrible’.

This treatment given to a pensioner has raised concerns about the backlog in correcting old state pension errors.

HMRC is responsible for changing National Insurance details, but the cases then go to the DWP, who recalculate the wrong payments and award arrears.

A steady stream of readers contact us about receiving underpayment letters, which then linger for months.

The DWP has refused to tell us how many staff are working on solving these cases.

But former Pensions Minister Ros Altmann says DWP staff are currently being diverted to deal with the huge number of pension credit claims from people who have lost their winter fuel payments.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of letters are pouring out from DWP and HMRC to people receiving underpaid state pensions, or to their loved ones in cases where they have already died.

Many older married women and widows, and both men and women over the age of 80, were underpaid a total of almost £1 billion in a state pension scandal exposed by our columnist Steve Webb and This is Money.

In another £1 billion blunder we highlighted, many mothers have missed out on large amounts of state pension due to gaps in their national insurance data.

After reading one of our stories, Mrs Plant realized her payments were too low due to the latest problem and contacted HMRC, as we recommended at the time.

But although HMRC responded quickly and confirmed a 16-year deficit, it was up to the DWP to sort out her state pension.

She owed a £28 increase to £171 a week, and her arrears had risen to more than £17,700 by the time This is Money stepped in to get her case resolved.

Mrs. Plant had written to us in despair: ‘I am no further along than this time last year. I was told it takes a long time, but I may be one of the deceased who didn’t receive it.”

Steve Darling, Liberal Democrats MP for Work and Pensions, said: ‘These underpayments affecting parents and carers are nothing short of heartbreaking; they should never have happened in the first place.

‘In addition, the reimbursement of those affected is unacceptably slow, even though these problems came to light as early as 2022.

‘It is imperative that the DWP acts urgently so that refunds can be made without further delay.’

> Do you or a deceased family member have an AOW arrears? Have you received a letter but have not heard anything since? Below you will find how to contact us

“I wish they had said, sorry you had to wait a year.” Or 18 years’

Christine Plant, 78, a retired administrative manager who lives with her husband in France, says it dawned on her that the years she spent raising children may be missing from her NI file after she wrote about the issue on this website read.

She contacted HMRC in November 2023, and they confirmed the same month that ‘protection of home responsibilities’ should be added to her file.

From then on, however, she struggled to figure out what impact, if any, this would have on her state pension.

Ms Plant called three times and received empty promises that she would receive another letter within a month and that an email about her case would be marked as urgent, but she heard nothing more.

She says a ‘terrible’ phone call lasted three hours as she was passed through wards, but still got nowhere.

She adds: ‘I called HMRC again. I said it’s been a year. I said if I owed you money you wouldn’t wait so long.’

Her case was finally resolved less than one working day after This is Money reported it to HMRC and DWP, and almost eleven months after she first asked HMRC if she owed HRP.

HMRC contacted us to say it had fulfilled its duties by processing Mrs Plant’s application and including the missing HRP in her NI file, and that the DWP was responsible for assessing a pension customer.

The DWP told us: ‘We have apologized for the delay in processing Ms Plant’s award. If errors do occur, we will do everything we can to resolve them as quickly as possible.’

However, Ms Plant says she has not received an apology, and meanwhile the DWP staff member who called her after This is Money raised her case blamed HMRC.

‘She said they had had my information there for a while but had been waiting for HMRC to give permission.

“She made it sound like he had been next to her for a long time.”

When Mrs Plant first heard the news that she would be in arrears of £17,700 during this phone call, she says: ‘I think she expected me to be ecstatic. I was amazed.’

She told us, “I honestly don’t think I would have gotten anything without you. To say that everything here is ready to go is an insult to my intelligence. I called them.

‘Why didn’t it appear at age 60. I wish they had said they were sorry you had to wait a year. Or 18 years old. They give it to me like it’s a favor. Without your help I wouldn’t have gotten it, I’m 100 percent sure. There must be many like me.

‘They should have said sorry. That would have made a difference if someone had said sorry, we didn’t resolve it instead of blaming someone else. The blame game. Always someone else’s fault.’

She says of her experience trying to deal with this on her own, “I wanted to give up. If I have any advice it’s to hang in there, but I don’t think I would have gotten anywhere without you and Steve looking into it.”

We asked the DWP whether it would pay Ms Plant interest on her arrears or compensation for the long delay in arranging her state pension increase and arrears. It declined to comment.

“Delay makes it worse,” says Steve Webb

“The government has admitted that around £1 billion in underpaid pensions is owed to women like Mrs Plant, who missed out on national insurance because they had spent time raising a family,” said Steve Webb, a former pensions minister. now This is Money’s retirement. columnist.

‘To find people, HMRC sent out over a quarter of a million letters and this will undoubtedly have led to a wave of applications.

‘A well-run government would have increased capacity at HMRC to process these claims and at DWP to calculate the impact on state pensions where NI data has been updated.

‘But too often we hear that HRP has been granted, while people wait in uncertainty for DWP to take action.

Webb, partner at LCP, added: “This delay makes matters worse given the length of time people have been underpaid.

‘While DWP has other priorities, such as processing additional applications for pension credits, this should not come at the expense of resolving long-term underpayments of state pensions.’

Another former Pensions Minister, Ros Altmann, who now sits in the House of Lords, said: ‘Many of these poor pensioners are experiencing problems and delays due to a lack of communication between HMRC and DWP and each department believes the other is responsible.

‘Unfortunately the DWP is the department responsible for actually paying out pensions and they have huge backlogs of cases.’

Speaking about Ms Plant’s experience, she said: ‘Clearly your intervention has pushed this case to the top of the pile, but it is worrying that so much time and energy is wasted trying to resolve cases.

‘It is not clear that there is a simple answer when there are so many errors to correct and the DWP is also currently redeploying staff to the Pension Credit Campaign to make up for the loss of winter fuel payments and assess claims from large numbers of people.

‘The decision on the winter fuel payment adds hugely to the pressure on DWP resources, which have been under pressure before.’