Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent assessment she has made of the reasons for her Department's delay in issuing first payments of the state pension to eligible pensioners.

We are aware that some State Pension customers have experienced delays in receiving their initial payments. This has been caused by a number of different factors, which individually would have been successfully managed by the organisation, but collectively, and with the added difficulties presented by the pandemic, created the delays that some customers have experienced. For example, we saw an unanticipated change in customer behaviour caused specifically by the economic conditions created by the pandemic.

Customers who were deferring their State Pension as they continued to work began to claim in greater numbers. This change in behaviour was one factor in a higher than expected number of State Pension claims being received. We also saw much greater than anticipated take-up of a new, simpler clerical claim form which was made available via Gov.uk from May 2020. We believe the surge in this channel was driven by the temporary reduction in our State Pension telephony service offering in response to the pressures of the pandemic. Again, this caused unexpected pressure on our clerical processing teams.

Following the equalisation of State Pension age, we have also seen a substantial increase in claim volumes throughout 2021.

Alongside changes in customer behaviour, we have also experienced high levels of attrition as colleagues secured progression in a number of other Government departments and on promotion within DWP. There has been a delay in recruiting sufficient new staff to return staffing to the required level. This has been our priority in the last quarter we have now recruited, trained and redeployed significant additional resources to support State Pension delivery. We were also impacted by the operational challenges and staff availability during the peak of the pandemic, in common with most other delivery organisations.