100,000 people underpaid their state pension have been given the date when they will get their money. The Department for Work and Pensions ( DWP ) has said that it is expecting to resolve all remaining state pension underpayment cases by the end of March 2027, with further updates to be shared as part of the government’s ‘Spring Forecast’ later this week (26 March).
It comes after it emerged the DWP has “basically finished” its state pension correction exercise and is making “good progress” to address Home Responsibilities Protection (HRP) errors, Permanent Secretary, Peter Schofield, has confirmed.
“I praise the professionalism of the team, because this is real detective work that they have gone through, but they have got there, and they have got money to people,” he stated. “I am really pleased, and I apologise through this committee to customers for these historic underpayments.
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“It was vital that we restored confidence in the system, and one of the ways that we did that was by doing more work through our survey data on getting to grips with any other historic errors that there might have been.”
“On that specifically, HMRC have been leading the way, because this relates to the national insurance record and linking that to child benefit claims prior to 2000 – these are quite historic claims,” he explained. “HMRC have put details on their website – I think there have been almost 500,000 hits to their website. They have written over 300,000 letters to affected people.
“They are now seeing cases coming through the door – at quite a slow rate, I should say. Those are then addressed in terms of correcting the national insurance record. That then enables us to change the state pension entitlement and, if someone is already in receipt of state pension, to then pay any arrears.
“We have got through around 11,000 of those that have come through. Around 19,000 have been handed over to DWP, and we have got through around 11,000 of those, so we are making good progress on that.”
DWP director general, finance, Catherine Vaughan, said: “This gives a further opportunity for people to have confidence in the accuracy of the system.” Mr Schofield also highlighted broader improvements, noting that DWP has “crucially” also been moving state pension records on to a new, modern platform, the Get your State Pension platform. “This initially was for new claims since 2016, but we are now starting to move some of the older claims over,” he said. “Being on a modern platform enables us to have the facility to scan and analyse the caseload much more effectively to see if we can pick up cases. “Up until now, the main way of picking up cases has been through the normal sampling we do on fraud and error each year, which is obviously a limited sample. However, on modern platforms, we will be able to do more of a scan. It is a continuous process of gathering data when we can, learning as we go along and improving the way we do our processes.”
