Personal finance expert Martin Lewis has revealed that pensioners could be owed tens of thousands of pounds due to an administrative error. Speaking on his BBC podcast, Mr Lewis explained that anyone who had children during a 32-year window could be entitled to backdated payments.
The money-saving guru disclosed that individuals might be eligible for significant sums, with one person telling him she was paid £31,000. He explained: 'This is an important heads up about a state pension error that mainly affects women between the ages of 40 and 90, and especially those in their 60s and 70s, because it's for people who took time off work between 1978 and 2010 to look after their children or to care for someone who is long-term disabled.'
You were meant to have got a thing called Home Responsibilities Protection, which should have given you National Insurance years to replace the ones you weren't getting by working, and you need those National Insurance years to get a full state pension. But it's possible over 100,000 women didn't. While the government had been trying to contact those women, it has stopped doing so now, so the onus is on you.
HMRC is using National Insurance records to identify as many people as possible who may have qualified for HRP between 1978 and 2010 but have no HRP recorded on their NI record, and is sending out letters. The Department for Work and Pensions estimates it has underpaid pensioners between £300m and £1.5bn in state pension due to errors in recording HRP. Accounting firm Robson Laidler has suggested that individuals could be owed roughly £5,000 in backdated payments on average.
Mr Lewis added: 'So what you need to do is you need to go onto gov.uk to see if you're projected to get the full state pension. If you're not, you need to see when your gaps in years were, were they between 1978 and 2010, and if so were they the years that you were not working to look after your children or someone who had long-term disabilities. If they were, you need to go and do your research on Home Responsibilities Protection, because you could be owed money.'
