Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many (a) men and (b) women received national insurance auto credits in each year since 2010; and what the cost was to the public purse of such auto credits.

Autocredits were available from 1983 to 2018. They were only available to men who were aged over the female State Pension age (SPa) but below male SPa. They ceased when the SPa for men and women equalised.

Men received autocredits only for the year in which they reached the female SPa and subsequent full tax years before age 65, protecting their National Insurance (NI) records over the period that a woman of the same age could already have claimed her State Pension.

As autocredits were only available to men, and in accordance with the policy and applicable legislation, no women received them (women were already receiving their State Pension at the time men of the same age were receiving autocredits).

Data for the number of individual men receiving autocredits for the period was not collected and is not readily available.

It is not possible to answer the question on costs. NI credits on their own have no intrinsic value or cost.