I’m 67 and have a 17-year shortfall in my state pension document – ought to I purchase top-ups? STEVE WEBB replies

I’m writing about a 17-year shortfall in National Insurance stamps. I was self-employed for 30 years on class two contributions.

I’m 69 now and I’ve worked since I was 15 years old, but the Government sent me a statement saying I was one stamp short here, one stamp there, and you have to pay a full year otherwise they take the whole year off you.

I’ve tried to contact them again but everyone is working from home. They said if I pay £8,240 before April they can give me 10 years’ stamps back.

I get £145 a week in state pension, I’ve never been on benefits and I worked for 53 years.

I don’t know what to do, and if I should get a loan to pay £8,240, but it would get me £50 a week extra but that would not cover the loan.

I’ve also got a lung condition, pulmonary fibrosis. They gave me three to five years to live at 62.

I’ve not applied for pension credit because my wife gets a full pension.

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Steve Webb replies: For anyone looking for a New Year’s resolution, checking if you can top up your state pension through voluntary National Insurance Contributions should certainly be a priority.

The deadline for filling gaps more than six years back is 6 April 2025, so I would encourage anyone who is thinking about doing this to find out where they stand and take action before the cut-off.

In your case, some of your ‘gaps’ arise because you didn’t pay enough contributions in some years for them to count as ‘qualifying years’ towards your state pension.

To be more specific, self-employed people have historically paid a weekly ‘Class 2’ rate of NI contributions. 

If you don’t pay for every week in a given year, you miss out for the whole of that year.

The good news for someone in your situation is that you can, in principle, top up those partial years at relatively low cost.

Provided you pay within the time limit (which currently allows you to go back as far as 2006/07), you should be able to fill these gaps very cheaply by paying voluntary Class 2 NI contributions.

The figures you have been quoted seem to imply that no account is being taken of the NI you have already paid for several years, nor the fact that you were self-employed.

For those who were employed rather than self-employed it would be normal for them to pay at the somewhat higher ‘Class 3’ rate of voluntary contributions.

Filling a full historic year generally costs £824 at the Class 3 rate which is why you have been quoted £8,240 to fill ten years.

To resolve a query like this I would normally suggest that you ring the Future Pension Centre at the DWP, but as you are already over state pension age you would need to ring the Pension Service instead.

I do appreciate that it can be hard to get through, but you should persevere until you can talk to someone.

If you have a printout of your NI record to hand and can explain which years are already showing as partial contributions this may be helpful.

I was however sorry to read that you have been in poor health and may have a limited life expectancy.

In terms of spending money to top up your state pension you will naturally want to compare how much it would cost you with how much you can expect to get back.

While this cannot be known with any certainty, you would need to draw your enhanced pension for more than three years to get back what you have paid – assuming that you have to pay at the full Class 3 rate.

But the payback period would be a great deal shorter if you were able to just fill odd gaps, and particularly if you could do so at the Class 2 rate.

If you find that you simply cannot get a sensible answer on the phone, you may wish to enlist the help of your local MP and ask him/her to raise your situation with both HMRC (which keeps National Insurance records) and DWP.

You should stress the urgency of getting all of this resolved in the next few months before the deadline on 6 April, after which it will only be possible to go back six years.