DWP repays over 80,000 people up to £12,000 after pension mistake
Tens of thousands of state pensioners have received a payment of up to £12,000 after a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) mistake.
The DWP previously announced that a large number of women who reached state pension age before April 2016 had been underpaid their state pension. This is because after this date, a woman's pension was no longer linked to their husband's.
The error was blamed on “outdated IT systems” and complex rules which required pension increase claims to be made manually rather than automatically. The underpayments are estimated to be worth around £1.46billion.
Since January 2021, the DWP has been working to repay those impacted and the recent figures released showed that of the 173,538 accounts checked between January 11, 2021 and October 31, 2023, up to 82,323 pensioners have been identified as having underpayments. The DWP has made £497million in repayments since January 2021.
Of those identified 37,488 married pensioners received an average payment of £5,931 each. More than 26,940 people over the age of 80 got an average of £2,245 each and a total of 17,894 widowed retirees were paid out an average of £12,383 per person.
Six teachers open up on 'difficult' strike decision - and why they are doing it
The final total amount due to be paid as a result of the error is estimated to be around £1.17billion to around 170,000 pensioners, according to the DWP. Originally the pensions and benefit department said it expected to complete the entire process by the end of 2023 however, it now believes that the project could run on “through to late 2024”.
Steve Webb, former pensions minister and now partner at LCP commeted: "The 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."
The former pensions minister also noted that it was a "tragedy" that tens of thousands of elderly women have died without ever receiving the money they were owed. He added: "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."
Those affected will be contacted by the DWP as soon as their case has been evaluated. The pensions department will likely send you a letter confirming how much back pay you are entitled to.
The first group of people affected were married women who should have received an upgrade to a 60% basic state pension when their husband retired. The second group is widows who should have inherited an enhanced state pension when their spouse died. The third group is people over the age of 80 who were already getting state pension but should've been automatically upgraded to a 60% basic state pension.
If you believe you are owed pension back payments, you should not contact the DWP, but instead should call the Pension Service. This is usually the quickest way to find out if you are eligible for a repayment. You can call the Pension Service on 0800 731 0469 but full contact details can be found on the Gov.uk website here.
A DWP spokesperson told the Mirror: “The action we are taking now is correcting historical underpayments made by successive governments. Our priority is ensuring pensioners receive the financial support to which they are entitled and we have set up a dedicated team and devoted significant resources towards completing the correction exercise.”
Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
