This piece first appeared in the money section of the Saga website on 7 May 2008
The text here may not be identical to the published text

 

Not so much a U-turn more an admission of truth

The Government has admitted that tens of thousands of women may not be getting enough state pension. Some will get their pension increased automatically. Others will have to let the DWP know.

Compare these statements about some of the women who may have slipped through the net and be getting the wrong pension.

"There were failsafe systems…the allegation that these cases weren’t being checked…is wrong…we are confident they are very few" James Purnell, then Pensions Minister, 12 May 2007

"Yes, there is evidence that perhaps quite significant numbers of women have not got all the Home Responsibilities allowance taken into account and…the Department for Work and Pensions and the Treasury have started urgent work on a special exercise to identify those people who may have been affected." Mike O’Brien, Pensions Minister, 3 May 2008.

What a difference 51 weeks makes. There are two groups of women that the DWP now accepts have been dealt with wrongly.

The first group are women who stayed at home to look after their own children or, sometimes, dependent adults. Each whole tax year spent at home should have resulted in special treatment when their state pension was worked out. It is called home responsibilities protection (HRP) and should be applied to their National Insurance account automatically. HRP means that years spent caring are deducted from the total number of years needed for a full pension. So getting HRP means a bigger pension. A year ago Liberal Democrat MP Steve Webb claimed that up to half a million women may not have had HRP properly recorded to their account. Nonsense said the DWP. Civil servants even tried to influence journalists to kill the story (I know I was one of them). Now a year on the Government accepts that mistakes have been made in a ‘significant number’ of cases. Finding the women now is difficult and expensive so any woman who got child benefit or cared for an adult from April 1978 and who gets a reduced state pension should contact the pension service to see if she should get more.

Another group who have been badly treated are up to 73,000 married women born between 6 April 1938 and 23 October 2004. If

AND

then they may be able to get a backdated pension for the years their husband was not retired. The DWP is also looking for them and, eventually, should find them.

Steve Webb says there may be up to 200,000 other women not getting the correct pension. Find out more from two good Government leaflets – one for under 60s and one for over 60s. Download them here

www.thepensionservice.gov.uk/resourcecentre/factsheets/home.asp

So what happened to James Purnell who got it so wrong a year ago? Two months later he was promoted to the Cabinet and is now Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

 


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