State Pension underpayments for 237,000 older people may not be corrected until the end of 2024
09.11.2022 - 17:03
/ dailyrecord.co.uk
A new report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) suggests that fraud and error levels in benefits spending at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is ‘unacceptably high’ and said that more must be done to get a grip on the billions of pounds being lost every year. The watchdog discovered that DWP overpaid an “eye-watering” £8.6 billion across benefits in 2021-22, with £6.5 billion of that figure due to fraud.
Meanwhile, problems with benefit underpayments can lead to severe hardship. The DWP estimates that 237,000 older people have been underpaid a total of £1.46 billion in State Pension, with underpayments going back as far as 1985.
The PAC report said that efforts to correct the systemic underpayment of the State Pension are too slow to meaningfully put things right and will be “too little, too late” for many affected pensioners.
The report states that in January 2021 the DWP launched an exercise to review around 400,000 cases ‘at risk’ of underpayment to confirm the extent of the issue and reimburse affected pensioners.
The DWP wrote to PAC in May 2022 explaining that it was on track to conclude the review of the original 400,000 cases by the end of 2023.
However, it noted in its most recent Annual Report and Accounts that it was planning on the basis that completion would likely be delayed to the end of 2024 because of the potentially affected pensioners newly identified during 2021-22.
The most significant new group of pensioners identified as being affected by underpayments related to Home Responsibilities Protection (HRP).
HRP was a scheme to help protect parents’ and carers’ State Pension credits while they stayed home to look after children and was replaced by National Insurance credits in 2010.
The website popstar.one is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can
send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.