The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) repaid £497m to individuals impacted by historical state pension underpayments as of 31 October 2023, having identified 82,323 underpayments.

The problems affected married women whose husbands reached pensionable age before 2008, as well as widows and those over 80, who were unknowingly entitled to an 'enhanced pension' that would have boosted their payments by up to 60 per cent.

The latest update on the issue revealed that DWP had reviewed 593,964 cases between 11 January 2021 and 31 October 2023, identifying a total of 82,323 underpayments.

In particular, a total of £220.3m had been repaid to the 37,488 cases involving a married woman, with an average arrears amount of £5,931, while a total of £219.9m had been paid in relation to the 17,894 widowed cases, with an average £12,383 payment.

In addition to this, £56.7m was repaid in relation to 26,941 cases involving over 80s, with an average payment of £2,245.

However, industry experts have warned that despite the welcome progress, the DWP “still has a mountain to climb” in terms of fixing historical state pension errors, with previous government estimates suggesting that the final total amount due to be paid is around £1.17bn.

This is an addition to a further £1bn in underpayments to around 187,000 parents, which arose due to errors in recording protection for time at home with children, previously known as Home Responsibilities Protection (HRP), on large numbers of National Insurance records.

Although HMRC recently started a programme of writing out to those who have potentially missed out on HRP, LCP argued that it is likely to take several years to reach all of those affected by this separate error.

Commenting on the latest updated, LCP partner, Steve Webb, stated: “The process of correcting state pension errors began nearly three years ago but still only around half of the money owed has been paid.

“Worse still, when DWP recently decided to do the first proper checks on state pensions in years, they identified another £1bn in underpayments and work has barely begun on fixing those errors. DWP still has a mountain to climb when it comes to paying all pensioners the amount they are due.

“It is a sorry chapter in the history of the department when well over 1,000 civil servants have had to spend years painstakingly fixing state pension errors which should have been picked up much sooner. And it is a tragedy that tens of thousands of elderly women have died without ever receiving the money they were due.

“It is vital that the process of fixing these errors continues to accelerate and that measures are taken to prevent the reoccurrence of such large-scale underpayments”

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