I paid £1,500 to top up my state pension but am no better off

I have made six unsatisfactory calls to HMRC but each time I am told that no one knows why it’s taking so long. At one point I was told that the payment would be allocated to my record in two weeks, but that was four months ago.

On each of the calls the person accepts that HMRC has received my payment and that I must just wait. I have spent about four hours on the phone trying to sort this out and am extremely frustrated. I feel like I’m being fobbed off.

Is this typical or am I the exception? I would really appreciate your help as I am failing to get anywhere.
June, Sussex

Katherine Denham writes

You are most certainly not the exception. I speak to many readers who are frustrated with HMRC taking too long to resolve problems or update accounts.

You need at least 35 full years on your national insurance record to claim the full new state pension which, at the time of writing, was £221.20 a week. On April 6 it rises to £230.25 a week in line with the triple lock guarantee.

If you have lots of gaps in your record, it can be sensible to make voluntary payments to increase your state pension (although this is not the case for everyone). In your case you would get back the amount you paid to top-up in less than 18 months.

A nine-month wait to have it reflected on your record is an appalling level of customer service.

If you pay by bank transfer, as you did, HMRC would usually allocate it to your record within days. Once the payment has been allocated, HMRC should communicate with the DWP, which then aims to update your state pension as soon as possible.

So why has yours taken so long? As you were filling historic gaps in your record dating back to 2006 and were paying for three years rather than one, HMRC had to manually allocate them rather than using its quicker automated system. Your record was finally updated four months after you made the payment.

HMRC is working through a lot of similar applications this year because a special window for plugging national insurance gaps going back to 2006 closes after April 5. Once that deadline has passed, you can fill gaps only from the past six years.

Yet even after HMRC updated your record, things were held up in the system when this new information was passed to the DWP.

The good news is that once I called both government departments they were quick to increase your payments to £113.09 a week. As of this month you will start getting £117.63 a week in line with the 4.1 per cent state pension increase. The DWP also worked out that it owed you £739.44 for the past nine months. As you were without those higher payments for so long, I was disappointed that it wouldn’t give you any interest or compensation.

A government spokesperson said: “We have apologised for the delay and have confirmed the new state pension amount.”

You said: “Many thanks for your assistance — I fear that without your support this saga would have dragged on.”

Charged for a Christmas tree I never bought

In January I noticed a £45 payment from my Lloyds bank account which I had not made. I went into my local bank branch, which then put me in touch with the fraud team. They told me that this was a contactless payment taken at 2.06pm on December 17 at a garden centre in north London and advised me to go there and get some more information on the transaction.

Fortunately I live in London so I travelled to the garden centre, which I had last visited about 15 years ago. The staff were really helpful and said there was only one transaction on December 17 for exactly £45, which had happened at the exact time the bank told me the payment had been made. They showed me a receipt for a Christmas tree with the last four digits of the card, which were different to mine.

I took this to my Lloyds bank branch which sent it to the fraud department. Lloyds then said this was probably an error rather than fraud, but that it would not repay the £45. It told me to go back to the garden centre, which I did, but the staff couldn’t do any more to help.

I’m so confused as to why this is so difficult to sort out. I think I have done more than enough to prove that this transaction wasn’t made by me.

I have been a long-standing customer of Lloyds for over 30 years and never asked for help in all that time. Although it’s only a small sum, I would like it back. I also want to know how this error could happen in the first place as I’m worried it could happen again.
Susan, London

Katherine Denham writes

I was very impressed with your tenacity, but it wasn’t fair of Lloyds to send you on a wild goose chase.

Fraudulent contactless payments would usually be refunded by your bank, but as Lloyds didn’t think this was fraud, your situation didn’t fit into that category. It told me that it was possible that your issue was caused by a processing error in the garden centre’s payment system, although it couldn’t confirm this.

While Lloyds said it wasn’t to blame for the error, it has agreed to refund you.

It said: “We’re sorry our customer has an unrecognised transaction on her account. We haven’t identified any fraud and the payment was processed in line with the merchant’s request, but we have refunded her as a sign of goodwill.”

Lloyds also paid you £300 for the inconvenience as a goodwill gesture, which you were very happy to accept.

• £552,746: The amount Your Money Matters has saved readers in 2025

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