The Liberal Democrat’s spokesperson for work and pensions, Stephen Lloyd, has asked the government to write off pension overpayments made as a result of public sector workers being contracted out.

Lloyd has branded the “mistakes made by the government” as “disgraceful”, noting that workers in the NHS, armed forces, teachers and thousands of local government employees could have some of their pension clawed back.

The problem has arisen because many workers who were contracted out of part of their additional state pension by their employers decades ago, he said. Discrepancies were found in the records, kept by the government in 2016, with the result that many people received an overpayment through no fault of their own, Lloyd explained.

Now each government department with workers affected must choose whether to clawback the overpayments, Lloyd stated, which he thinks could “plunge the retirement plans of tens of thousands of hard working people into chaos”.

As a result, he has written to the secretaries of state for health, education, and housing and local government to urge them not to claw back the pension over payments.

“Just last week, with the latest economic growth figures, we have seen another example of this government’s incompetence. I think clawing back the pension overpayments would be this government profiting from its past failures, both in terms of how the over payments were made in the first place, and now with the economy weakening,” he stated.

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