Should my mum claim state pension or stay on Severe Disablement Allowance?

My parents had been married for 60 years when my father passed away last September.

I would like to know if my mum is better off claiming her state pension as she never claimed when she was 60 and now she is 85 or to keep her severe disability benefit which is now £90.95 a week worth plus an allowance of £247.40 per month.

When she turned 60 she did ask if she should claim her pension, but the Department of Work and Pensions said the SDA was worth a few pounds more.

Mama has 23 AOW years. She called the RDW twice and I called once without getting an answer whether my mother would be better off with her state pension than the SDA, and whether she would be entitled to my father’s contributions (he paid full contributions ).

The member of staff on the last call said she would email someone else and we would call again if we didn’t hear anything else by the end of March. We haven’t had an answer.

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Steve Webb replies: I am very sorry to hear about your recent passing and the difficulties you have had in resolving your mother’s pension entitlements.

I think your mom should be getting a lot more than she’s currently being paid and it shouldn’t have taken them that long to sort it out.

Your mother has to deal with a corner of the allowance system known as the ‘overlapping allowance rules’.

The idea behind these rules is to prevent someone from receiving two different benefits for the same purpose.

To give a simple example, if someone receives benefits because they are unemployed and then becomes too ill to work, they cannot receive Job Seeker’s Allowance (for unemployment) and Employment Support Allowance (for sickness) at the same time, as they are both meant to do the same thing – give you an income when you can’t work.

Did you miss out on an AOW benefit if you were a widower?

This is Money columnist Steve Webb is urging elderly widows who may have missed a back payment when their husbands died to get in touch.

He wants to help people get money that is rightfully theirs, and find out if there’s a systemic problem that hasn’t been picked up in the government’s massive correction exercise for older women who were underpaid.

Find out if you may be affected and how to contact Steve here.

> Will you miss out on AOW if you became a widow on retirement?

As for your mother’s specific case, when she reached retirement age, she had an old benefit called the Severe Disability Allowance.

This used to be a benefit to people who were too ill to work, but did not have enough national insurance contributions to qualify for a national insurance benefit.

When she reached retirement age, your mother had a choice between staying on SDA or taking old age pension. Because of “cumulative benefit” rules, she couldn’t receive both at the same time.

For some people it made sense to stay on SDA. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that the SDA is worked out in a different way than the AOW and that some people may be entitled to more SDA than the AOW.

The second reason for choosing SDA is that it is not taxable, while the retirement pension is taxable.

In your mother’s case, it’s entirely possible that when she first retired, staying on SDA was the right decision.

However, just because it was the right idea at the time doesn’t mean it couldn’t change later in retirement.

Particularly when your mother turned 80, it would have been worthwhile applying for state pension at that time, especially now that she has become a widow.

From the time your mother turned 80, she could have claimed at that point something called a “category D” contributory pension for anyone age 80 and older who meets a basic residency test.

The current rate of that pension is £93.60 which is slightly higher than the SDA figure you quote

If so, I suggest that she apply retroactively for state pension benefits. This can be done retrospectively for 12 months and would gain her a few extra pounds a week during that time.

More importantly, now that your mother has unfortunately become a widow, she can claim a state pension based on her husband’s contributions.

This would normally be a full basic pension, currently worth £156.20 per week (assuming your late father had a full contribution history).

She can also inherit all or part of the ‘supplementary’ AOW pension he received.

The most important thing is that your mother is entitled to the state pension, because she does not pay any state pension if no claim has been made.

More generally, I would encourage anyone who is retired and currently receiving SDA to consider what state pension percentage they could receive if they switched to state pension.

However, they should check that stopping claiming disability benefits (SDA) and moving to old age pension will not affect other benefits they receive as a result of having disability benefits.