My mother’s £201-a-week state pension is her only income and that suddenly stopped

For Elizabeth Fletcher from Hemsworth, West Yorkshire, the state pension is a lifeline.

The 90-year-old is among the one in four retirees who consider it their main source of income in retirement.

Crucially, Elizabeth’s state pension and pension credits of £201 a week will also fund the costs of her new care home, which she moved to on January 15.

So when the government suddenly stopped all payments to Elizabeth on January 26, just eleven days after she settled down, her new life was thrown into chaos.

Over the next nine weeks, Elizabeth missed out on almost £2,000 in payments.

And despite her daughter Wendy’s best efforts to find out why her mother was no longer receiving a state pension, she received no response from the Department for Work and Pensions.

Without the money, Wendy, 63, who lives 15 miles away in Wakefield, says she feared her mother would be kicked out of the care home.

Wendy says: ‘It was incredibly stressful. My mother isn’t doing well and she can’t cope with the problem, so I took it upon myself. But reaching the DWP for help seems impossible.

“I pulled my hair out and did everything I could.”

Wendy says she alerted the pension department on January 26 that her mother was moving into a care home.

Until January, Elizabeth received an attendance allowance, which helps with the extra costs if you have a disability so severe that you need someone to help you at home. Wendy informed the DWP of her mother’s changed circumstances when she moved into the care home.

She expected her mother’s attendance fees to stop, but was shocked when state pension and pension credit payments were also stopped immediately.

“I tried to do everything by the book, but it was a nightmare,” says Wendy.

‘The bills kept coming in from the care home and I was afraid she was going to be evicted for non-payment.’

Elizabeth, mother of five and grandmother of five, was known as the Shirley Bassey of the North in her youth, when she sang in working men’s clubs.

She has held various positions throughout her life, including as a hospital assistant.

Wendy says it became clear that Elizabeth needed full-time care when she could no longer remember how to do simple tasks such as making a cup of tea. Her symptoms present themselves as dementia, Wendy believes.

Wendy, who has worked in the police force for over forty years, most recently as a community support worker, has leukemia and has taken early retirement. She says the ordeal has taken a major toll on her own physical and mental health.

The former official spent hours calling the pension department, but despite her efforts, no one helped resume payments.

After waiting for hours to speak to an official, Wendy says she encountered “rude, unhelpful and inexperienced” employees who were unable to resolve the problem. Three times the line was disconnected mid-phone conversation.

She says, “They kept putting the phone down. I don’t know if it’s because it became too complicated for them, but the conversation would end abruptly.’

Each time the call ended, Wendy had to wait another hour before she could speak to another employee. The frustration brought her to tears.

In March, in desperation, as she feared her mother would soon be evicted from the care home, Wendy contacted her local MP Simon Lightwood, who wrote to the DWP.

Nine weeks after payments stopped, Wendy was relieved to see £1,809.45 had been paid into Elizabeth’s account. But she received no letter or phone call with an explanation.

“The money showed up one day. “They didn’t offer me any apology or tell me why it happened,” she said.

When contacted by Money Mail, the DWP confirmed that payments would resume as normal.

A spokesperson said: ‘We have reinstated Ms Fletcher’s pension payments and made arrears payments to cover the suspension period. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused.’

It is understood that payments were stopped due to an administrative error by the pension department.

Money Mail has seen cases in the past where state pension payments were wrongly reduced or suspended when the recipient reported a change in circumstances.

In one case, a widow’s state pension was reduced after the death of her husband, while other suspensions were due to computer glitches.

In 2020, the government admitted that it had made systematic errors in its calculations of state pensions.

A total of 237,000 older women were affected. Estimates suggest they owe almost £1.5 billion in underpaid state pension.

Last week, MPs wrote to the DWP raising concerns about yet another group of women who may have received underpaid state pensions.

Divorced women who reached state pension age before 2016 may have been short-changed if they wrongly missed out on allowances related to their ex-husband’s contributions.

Sir Steve Webb, a former pensions minister and partner at consultancy LCP, which has been at the forefront of highlighting underpayments, said the error in Elizabeth’s case was ‘unacceptable but not surprising’.

“The DWP operates on such a scale that the individual can get lost,” he says.

‘You might imagine that these types of situations happen all the time and that it will happen more and more often as more of us live longer and need care. So the DWP should have systems in place to make this seamless.”

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