Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many UK pensioners living overseas had their pensions suspended in (a) 2019, (b) 2020, (c) 2021 due to (i) non-return and (ii) late return of life certificates, broken down by country of residence.

DWP holds data relating to the late and non-return of a Life Certificate for the 2019 period, which resulted in the temporary suspension of a customer’s State Pension payments. In 2019, 26,206 claims were temporarily suspended, which is broken down by country as shown in the following table: -

As a result of the outbreak of COVID in 2020, DWP suspended the Life Certificate exercise in March 2020, to ensure that our customers were not negatively impacted by any postal service issues which could have resulted in their State Pension payments being temporarily suspended. Therefore, DWP does not hold any data for this period.

DWP reintroduced the Life Certificate exercise in November 2021. Therefore, DWP does not hold any data for 2021, as any potential suspensions would be applied after 16 weeks of issue of the Life Certificate, which would mean that the suspension occurred in 2022.

The Management Information used has been taken from the same operational source data systems as our published administrative data. However, as this Management Information is not a recognised National or Official Statistic, it has not been subjected to the same level of Quality Assurance. As a result, these figures should be treated with caution.