"Married women to receive £23,000 state pension windfall"

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"Married women to receive £23,000 state pension windfall"

Postby dutchman » Fri Apr 02, 2021 1:28 pm

Pensioners are in for a £3bn payout after years of underpayment due to a Government oversight

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More than 74,000 married women are to receive a windfall of up to £23,000 after years of being short-changed by the Government on their state pension.

In total, 200,000 women who were underpaid the state pension for years are due refunds totalling £2.9bn. Large numbers of elderly, widowed and divorced women have been forced to get by on a reduced stipend for years due to a Government oversight.

New figures released by the Office for Budget Responsibility have shown the average arrears payment for the first time. Widowed retirees are owed an average £17,000, this rises to £23,000 for married women.

Meanwhile, 72,000 over 80s have been underpaid more than half a billion pounds and are to receive an average payment of more than £10,000 over the next five years. The Government is due to hand over £570m every year until 2026 to cover for the loss of income.

The underpayment of over 80s is “inexcusable incompetence”, former pensions minister Sir Steve Webb has said.

Slamming the Department of Work and Pensions for the “appalling” error, Sir Steve, who is now partner at consultancy Lane Clark & Peacock, said there should not have been any difficulty in paying a standard rate of pension to anyone aged 80 or more. He added: “Getting complex calculations about pensions wrong for tens of thousands of widows and married women is bad enough. To fail to do even that basic task amounts to incompetence.”

Baroness Ros Altmann, also a former pensions minister, called for a full investigation and report into what went wrong. She said: "It has taken a long time, since the problem was first discovered, for the issue to be taken seriously and the DWP’s own helplines seem to have falsely assured many of the women who claimed they were being underpaid that they were actually receiving the correct amount."

It will still be a long time before all those affected are reimbursed and there is a concern that many will sadly pass away without enjoying the extra money, Baroness Altmann added.

In November, the DWP severely underestimated the total cost it would have to pay for the mistake, forecasting a cost of £100m. It has since emerged that it will have to compensate pensioners for close to £3bn. It will be a major embarrassment for the DWP, which identified the oversight in 2020.

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Re: "Married women to receive £23,000 state pension windfall"

Postby rebbonk » Fri Apr 02, 2021 3:21 pm

It will be a major embarrassment for the DWP...


Will it hell! They don't give a sh*t.
Of course it'll fit; you just need a bigger hammer.
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Re: "Married women to receive £23,000 state pension windfall"

Postby dutchman » Mon Apr 05, 2021 2:10 pm

Typical! :fuming:

My mum was underpaid state pension for years and is now penalised by the council...

My mother is a victim of the £3billion state pension scandal. It now appears that she is being victimised again by the local authority.

Due to this scandal my mother has recently received a sizeable payment from the Department for Work and Pensions, because of their ineptitude going back 12 years to when my father passed away.

Now because of this payment the local authority has ceased my mother's housing and council tax benefit, because they have deemed this payment as capital which takes my mother above the £16,000 savings limit.

So not only has she been underpaid by the DWP for the past 12 years, this underpayment, that has now been rectified, is going to be taken back from her in time by the local authority.

Is this something that the local authority can do? I also wonder how many other women will be in the same boat as my mother and be victimised twice for money they were entitled to and were not paid over many years, only for their benefits to be stopped once they received it?

Steve Webb replies:

Many people will feel that it is unfair that they have lost out twice. First, they were underpaid on their state pension, sometimes for many years.

Second, they may now lose out on means-tested benefits because their pension has been paid as a lump sum rather than each week.

Ideally, DWP would agree to ignore these lump sums when working out benefits, but we have so far seen no indication that they plan to do so.

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By the way there is a major error in the original article. It says deductions from Housing Benefit begin at £6,000 when it's actually £10,000 for pensioners and has been for many years. Also not mentioned is that legal compensation awards are not counted towards the total.
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