More than two years ago now, I wrote to the Department for Work and Pensions in Wolverhampton to ask if my late mother owed any pension payments, as all these cases appeared.
I wasn’t sure if there was anything she should do, but when I asked about it, I got a canned response back saying I didn’t have to do anything else, just wait and they’d get back to you. Then nothing at all.
I have completed the form online several times and have not received a response. I’ve made inquiries and get a different answer each time. One was, ‘Wow, two years that’s a long time, let me see yeah, your mom’s claim hasn’t settled yet.’
Looking for answers: I want to know if my late mother had an underpaid state pension, but I’m not getting anywhere ( Stock Image )
A week before I called and someone else said someone was looking into it, but as it’s a historical claim it will take a while.
I haven’t heard anything at all and more than two years is wrong. Do they leave the relations of the deceased to the last? Can you help me? Just want to check but I’m not getting anywhere, just passed on and given another story.
SCROLL DOWN TO FIND OUT HOW TO ASK STEVE YOUR PENSION QUESTION
Steve Webb replies: The government has admitted that the many errors discovered in recent years regarding the state pension have not only affected those still receiving benefits, but also those who have sadly passed away.
In this column I explain how the government intends to put things in order in such cases.
It may be helpful to look separately at the two different billion-pound mistakes that DWP has made.
The first is the series of errors first identified by This is Money. Broadly speaking, these are mistakes made after someone retired.
In particular, many thousands of married women and widows did not have their state pensions re-established when their husbands retired or died.
In addition, thousands of very low pensioners did not get an automatic raise when they turned 80.
To rectify this group of mistakes, DWP has set up a project that started in January 2021 and is not expected to be completed until the end of 2024.
According to the most recent Department of Work and Pension annual reportt, they have so far made payments worth £324 million to just over 50,000 people in relation to these errors.
In total, DWP expects to make payments to 170,000 people worth just under £1.2 billion.
The exercise prioritizes those who are alive and therefore payments to the estates of those who have died are more likely to occur in 2024 than this year.
This naturally raises the question of how DWP will find the next of kin.
They estimate that they will only find survivors in about 75 percent of cases where there was an underpaid pension for married women, and only about 57 percent in cases where a widow was underpaid or someone over 80 was underpaid.
To help with this, as you say, they have set up a “bereaved relatives portal” titled Request information about underpaid state pension for someone who has passed away with which families can register their data.
However, registering information here does not mean that you would ‘jump in line’ or get a quick response. It simply means that if and when they review retirement payments to a deceased loved one, they *at that time* have the correct information to contact the next of kin.
Unfortunately, there’s probably not much you can do at this stage once you’ve registered your details.
Turning now to the second £1bn error on state pensions, this one is due to errors in registering ‘Home Responsibilities Protection’ in the National Insurance records of over 200,000 parents – mainly mothers.
In its most recent annual report, DWP said it had probably underpaid a total of 210,000 people and will pay an estimated £1 billion. Of these people, 150,000 are still alive, but 60,000 have since died.
A combination of people potentially failing to come forward to make a claim alongside problems tracing people means they have a budget to pay out around £1.2bn to 187,000 people.
This is based on finding about 95 percent of those who are still alive and just under three quarters of those who are deceased.
Should anyone think that a deceased parent may be underpaid for this reason, I again encourage them to register through the “Descendants Portal.”
While this doesn’t guarantee swift action – as you’ve seen – it does mean that if and when the DWP or HMRC investigate a loved one’s case, they know who to contact.
HMRC has not yet said much about how they will tackle the HRP issue. It is clear that some letters will be written, but HMRC has little idea who might have missed. So they probably depend in part on general publicity.
One helpful thing you can do to prepare for this is gather information about the children (probably adults now) for whom the deceased parent received child support in the 1980s and 1990s.
HMRC will want to know full names, dates of birth and social security numbers, and being able to collect this information will increase the chances that a successful award of HRP can be made in due course.
A final challenge in establishing justice is the fact that official documents are often thrown out, so it can be difficult to prove something that happened many years ago.
For example, child benefit data from the 1980s and 1990s no longer exists – hence the need to collect other data about the children back then.
But NI records were also often erased several years after the last member of a couple died.
While DWP has temporarily stopped deleting historical records, if your loved one passed away many years ago, their records are highly unlikely to have been preserved and therefore unlikely to show up in a computer scan of the NI database.
HMRC has delayed updating my state pension record with additions AND grandparent credits
A reader who encountered not one, but two ‘sticking points’ at HMRC finally got somewhere after This is Money and I intervened on her behalf.
After I pointed out the delay in updating her National Insurance record in a recent column, the reader continued to struggle to get that straightened out and to get a refund for voluntary contributions that duplicated several qualifying years she owed.
She made an official complaint, but was at one point told by a member of staff that the whole process – with HMRC updating her NI record and DWP recalculating her state pension – could take up to a year.
We reported her case again to HMRC, and a spokesperson said: ‘We have apologized to Mrs [name redacted] and updated her National Insurance record. We refunded the voluntary contributions she didn’t need.
“The voluntary National Insurance deadline has been extended to April 2025. The vast majority of voluntary contributions paid will be updated within days, but complex cases must be processed manually, so they may take longer to resolve.”
This case should now be with the Ministry of Work and Pensions to work out her AOW, which will start next month.
This is Money has also suffered delays there after a rush of people buying state pension supplements before an important deadline was pushed back by another two years.
But she is assured that if her DWP account is not updated on time, she will not be penalised, and any underpayments will be rectified. Hopefully, the end of the saga is now in sight for this tenacious reader.
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