Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps he is taking to ensure that reforms to the pensions system do not unfairly affect widows who have relied on their husband's earnings and have not themselves made a sufficient contribution.

The new State Pension will be based on an individual’s own National Insurance contributions. This reflects the fact that, in contrast to earlier generations of women, most people of working age today are able to gain sufficient qualifying years to qualify for a state pension in their own right.

We have put arrangements in place to ensure that certain women who elected to pay National Insurance contributions at the married women and widows’ reduced rate are not affected by withdrawing access to derived basic State Pension. Widows who qualify under these arrangements will be able to get a pension of about the same as the basic pension they could have got in the current scheme plus any additional State Pension they built up themselves by April 2016, if that is more than they would get under the new rules on their own contributions.

We are also protecting the additional State Pension (also known as SERPS or S2P) a surviving spouse or civil partner would have been able to inherit under the current rules, if their deceased partner had either died or reached State Pension age before 6 April 2016. Where both members of the couple are in the new State Pension system, the surviving member may inherit half of any “protected payment” (the amount, if any, by which a person’s state pension valued under current rules exceeds the full rate of the new State Pension at 2016). These arrangements will apply where the marriage or civil partnership had begun before the new scheme starts.