Are you owed more pension?
Thousands who claimed child benefit could be due a payout, says Paul Lewis.
The Government has admitted it owes around £1 billion to tens of thousands of people who were given too little state pension because it didn’t apply the correct rules to the calculation. But so far it has only found about one in ten of them, and repaid them a mere £100 million.
The pensioners concerned – and there could be as many as 370,000 – are almost all women, though some men may also be eligible. They got child benefit for a child between 1978 and 2010, and didn’t work or pay National Insurance contributions during some of that time. Those missing contributions should have been taken into account when their pension was calculated. But in many cases they were not, and that would have left some of them with a state pension that was less than it should have been.
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The error was discovered by officials when they were trying to find three other groups who were underpaid – people over 80, married women and widows. That exercise is now over and resulted in payments averaging more than £6,000 to 130,000 pensioners. But the Government has found it much more difficult to identify the underpaid mothers. That is partly because, since 1999, some records are routinely destroyed – so it’s not possible to link up underpaid pensions with receipt of child benefit.
The Government has identified 370,000 people who might be enti[1]tled to more pension, and wrote to them between December 2023 and September 2024. But the response rate was very low and only around 12,000 have been repaid. Tens of thousands of others may still be owed money. They are people who: • Claimed child benefit between 1978 and 2010 for a child under 16 and: • Get a reduced state pension – the old state pension is currently £176.45 a week and the new one £230.25. A reduced pension will be less than these amounts.
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Not everyone who can say yes to both questions will be owed money – their pension may be less for other reasons. But they should check their entitlement at gov.uk: search for ‘Home Responsibilities Protection’ and scroll down to ‘Check if you’re eligible’. It’s well worth doing: the average payment made so far has been £8,377.
The cost or retirement is estimated at £31.700 a year - read more here
QUESTIONS? Send any questions to Paul.Lewis@radiotimes.com. I cannot answer you personally, but I will reflect them in this column.