DWP makes 78-year-old owed £17,700 in state pension wait nearly a yr

Christine Plant: ‘They should have said sorry. That would have made a difference, for someone to have said sorry we didn’t sort it’

A 78-year-old was stuck in a state pension corrections queue for nearly a year and repeatedly fobbed off by government staff.

Christine Plant, pictured right, received confirmation by letter of a 16-year hole in her records, but kept being sent round in circles at HMRC and the Department for Work and Pensions.

That includes on one three-hour phone call she describes as ‘awful’.

This treatment meted out to a pensioner has prompted concern about the backlog in correcting old state pension errors.

HMRC is responsible for amending National Insurance records, but cases then go to the DWP which recalculates wrong payments and awards arrears.

A steady stream of readers are contacting us about getting letters about underpayments then being left hanging for months.

The DWP has refused to tell us how many staff are working on resolving these cases.

But former Pensions Minister Ros Altmann says DWP staff are currently being diverted to deal with the huge number of pension credit claims from people who have lost Winter Fuel Payments.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of letters have been pouring out from DWP and HMRC to people being underpaid state pension, or to their loved ones in cases where they have already died.

Many elderly married women and widows, and both men and women aged over 80, were underpaid a total of nearly £1billion in a state pension scandal uncovered by our columnist Steve Webb and This is Money.

In a different £1billion blunder we highlighted, many mothers lost out on large sums in state pension due to holes in their National Insurance records.

Mrs Plant realised after reading one of our stories that her payments were too low due to the latter problem, and she contacted HMRC as we recommended at the time.

But although HMRC swiftly responded to confirm a 16-year shortfall, it was down to the DWP to sort out her state pension.

She was owed a £28 boost to £171 a week, and her arrears had built up to more than £17,700 by the time This is Money intervened to get her case resolved.

Mrs Plant had written to us in despair, saying: ‘I am no further forward than this time last year. I’m told it takes a long time but I could end up being one of the deceased that didn’t receive it.’

Steve Darling MP, Liberal Democrat spokesperson for work and pensions, says: ‘These underpayments affecting parents and family carers are simply heartbreaking – they should have never happened in the first place. 

‘Moreover, repayment of those affected has been unacceptably slow, even though these issues came to light as far back as 2022.

‘It is imperative that the DWP acts with urgency so that repayments can be deployed without any further delay.’

> Are you or a late relative owed state pension arrears? If you had a letter but heard nothing more, find out how to contact us below

‘I wish they had said sorry you were kept waiting for a year. Or 18 years’

Christine Plant, 78, a retired administration manager who lives in France with her husband, says it dawned on her the years she spent bringing up children might be missing from her NI record after reading about the issue on this website.

She contacted HMRC in November 2023, and it confirmed the same month that ‘home responsibilities protection’ needed to be added to her record.

However, she struggled from then onward to find out what impact – if any – this would have on her state pension.

Mrs Plant called three times and was given empty promises that she would be sent a further letter within a month, and an email about her case would be marked urgent, but she heard nothing more.

She says one ‘awful’ call lasted three hours as she was passed around departments, yet she still got nowhere.

She adds: ‘I rang HMRC again. I said it’s been a year. I said if I owed you any money you wouldn’t wait this long.’

Her case was finally resolved less than one working day after This is Money flagged it to HMRC and DWP, and nearly 11 months after she first asked HMRC whether she was owed HRP.

HMRC contacted us to say it had fulfilled its duties by processing Mrs Plant’s application and recording the missing HRP onto her NI record, and that the DWP was responsible for reviewing a customer’s pension.

The DWP told us: ‘We have apologised for the delay in processing Mrs Plant’s award. Where errors do occur, we are committed to resolving them as quickly as possible.’

However, Mrs Plant says she has received no apology, and meanwhile the DWP staff member who called her after This is Money raised her case blamed HMRC.

‘She said they had got my information sitting there for some time ready to go but they had been waiting for HMRC to give the go ahead.

‘She made it sound like it had been sat there at the side of her for a long time.’

When Mrs Plant heard the news for the first time during this phone call that she would be paid £17,700 in arrears, she says: ‘I think she expected me to be ecstatic. I was dumbfounded.’

She told us: ‘I honestly don’t think I would have got anything without you. Saying it’s waiting here all ready to go, it’s an insult to my intelligence. I have been phoning them up.

‘Why didn’t it appear at the age of 60. I wish they had said they are sorry you were kept waiting for a year. Or 18 years. They are giving it to me as if it’s a favour. I wouldn’t have got it without your help, I’m 100 per cent sure. There must be lots like me.

‘They should have said sorry. That would have made a difference, for someone to have said sorry we didn’t sort it instead of blaming someone else. The blame game. Always someone else’s fault.’

She says of her experience trying to sort this out alone: ‘I was going to give up. If I have got any advice it’s to persevere, but I don’t think I would have got anywhere without you and Steve looking into it.’

We asked the DWP whether it would pay Mrs Plant interest on her backpayment or compensation for the long delay in sorting out her state pension increase and arrears. It refused to comment. 

‘Delay adds insult to injury’, says Steve Webb

‘The Government has admitted that around one billion pounds is owed in underpaid pensions to women such as Mrs Plant who missed out on National Insurance protection for time spent raising a family,’ says Steve Webb, a former Pensions Minister and now This is Money’s retirement columnist.

‘To try to find people, HMRC has issued well over a quarter of a million letters and this will undoubtedly have led to a surge in applications.

‘A well run government would have increased capacity at HMRC to deal with these claims and at DWP to work out the impact on state pensions where NI records have been updated.

‘But we are hearing too often that HRP has been awarded yet people are in limbo waiting for DWP to take action.

Webb, who is a partner at LCP, adds: ‘This delay adds insult to injury given how long people may have been underpaid.

‘Although DWP has other priorities such as processing extra claims for pension credit, this should not be at the expense of sorting out longstanding state pension underpayments.’

Another former Pensions Minister, Ros Altmann, who now sits in the House of Lords, says: ‘So many of these poor pensioners are experiencing problems and delays because of a lack of communication between HMRC and DWP and each department believes the other is responsible.

‘Sadly the DWP is the department responsible for actually paying the pensions out and they have huge backlogs of cases to deal with.’

Regarding Mrs Plant’s experience, she says: ‘Clearly your intervention has pushed this case to the top of the pile but it’s worrying that so much time and energy is being wasted trying to sort things out.

‘It’s not clear there is any easy answer while there are so many errors which need correcting and the DWP is also currently diverting staff to the pension credit campaign to offset the loss of Winter Fuel Payments and assess claims from huge numbers of people.

‘The Winter Fuel Payment decision is adding hugely to the pressure on DWP resources which were already stretched before.’