A widow has explained how she managed to get a £23,000 lump sum due to being underpaid on her state pension. The pensioner believed she should have been due more than the £400 a month she was getting along with a small pension from her husband after he died.
A Department of Work and Pensions system error has meant that around 700,000 people, who are mainly women, have had their state pensions reviewed. The woman, who has not been named, believed she was one of those and ended up in a battle for eight years with the DWP, the Times reported.
It took many phone calls – but in the end the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) finally admitted that she was right and paid her £23,000. The DWP has paid out £571.6 million to almost 100,000 pensioners whose payments should have been boosted, either when they turned 80, or because of their husband’s national insurance contributions.
The 71-year-old looked after her husband from 2013, when he began showing signs of dementia, until his death in 2016. She was getting less than £400 a month from her state pension and relying on money from his pension to get by.
After he died the woman who lives in Surrey, found it even harder to make ends meet and was having to ask her brothers for financial help. So she contacted the DWP to ask if the payment was right. She was told that she was getting the maximum she was entitled to – but she refused to give in and continued to query her low pension.
The Government is currently reviewing pension records to find those who should have received an automatic uplift in their pension, but didn’t. This includes people if they are a woman whose husband turned 65 on or after 17 March 2008 and being paid less than 60% of their husband’s basic state pension.
It can also include a widow whose husband died after 17 March 2008 and they were paid less than 60% of his state pension while he was alive, or a widow whose state pension didn’t increase when your husband died. If you’re aged 80 and over and not being paid at least £85 a week in state pension. The Government is prioritising those over 80 and those who have been widowed. In theory those owed money should be contacted by the DWP.
The woman told the Times: “The stress of losing my husband was made worse by the worry of struggling on a low pension and how I would afford to live and this made my health much worse.”
Entitlement to the state pension is usually based on your national insurance contributions. You need 35 full years of contributions to get the new full state pension of £221.20 a week (£11,502 a year). You need ten qualifying years of contributions to get anything at all, although there is pension credit, a benefit for those on low incomes.
But women born before April 6, 1953 and men born before April 6, 1951 get the old basic state pension, which pays less, but offers the chance to boost the amount you get, based on your spouse’s national insurance record, either after your spouse dies, or reaches state pension age — dependent on how you paid national insurance, and how much you paid.
The woman’s husband ran a vegetable wholesaler and she stayed at home – having made some national insurance contributions. She did not have a full record and so was not entitled to a full basic state pension. When he died, however, her entitlement should have risen, thanks to his full record of contributions.
She was getting £441 a month state pension and she called the DWP in desperation. “I told them I couldn’t survive on so little and they advised me to apply for pension credit. I sent off all the paperwork in February and must have chased eight or nine times on its progress but was told there was a big backlog.”
When she called an agent told her that the DWP was waiting for a response to a letter sent to her that month, which she said never arrived. The letter confirmed what Mary had suspected for years — her state pension had been underpaid. The government now owed her £23,000.
To get the payment boosts, married, widowed or divorced women used to have to contact the DWP, but this changed in 2008. From that point on, the extra payments should have been made automatically. The DWP has been trying to correct systematic state pension underpayments since 2021. It said: Our priority is ensuring pensioners get the dignity and security they deserve in retirement and that state pension underpayment rates remain as low as possible. We have completed the majority of cases as planned and expect to complete by the year end.”
The advice is to fill out a form at gov.co.uk by clicking here if you think you’ve been underpaid.
