National Insurance Pension Underpayments

Lord Palmer of Childs Hill Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, some of the cases in the LEAP exercise go back to 2006, so this is already going back a very long way, but I can reassure the noble Lord that that the exercise went back through the book. This is really complicated, as I am sure he understands, but, in summary, the exercise specifically addressed women who reached the state pension age ahead of their husbands. That was not uncommon because, in those days, the retirement age for women was 60 and for men it was 65, so the woman got to the state pension age first. If she did not have enough pension in her own right and her husband reached the state pension age, she could then have inherited more state pension from his contributions. After 2008, that should have been done automatically by the DWP. Earlier, people had to claim, but where the DWP failed to do that automatically, the department has gone back through the entire book and made payments to all those people. That is what the system has been doing.

[Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD)]

My Lords, there seems to be errors and more errors—a tower of errors without end. State pension underpayments have also arisen where there are errors in NI records, because of missing home responsibilities protection. The Minister mentioned pensions for women. Can she tell us how much the department has so far paid in arrears to those affected mothers? When does she expect this correction exercise to be completed?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

That was slightly different: it was about an error in people’s national insurance records. The DWP itself discovered during a fraud and error exercise that there were some historic errors in recording where people should have had home responsibilities protection in their national insurance record, which in turn would have affected their pension record. The Government have now contacted all the people they have identified as potentially missing HRP and invited them to make a claim for those missing periods. HMRC issued over 370,018 letters to potentially affected customers, and there have been approximately 493,813 hits on the GOV.UK HRP online checker. So far, the DWP has received 19,491 cases from HMRC and processed 11,694 of them, paying arrears of £42 million. I hope that answers the noble Lord’s question.